William Gibson Plumbs the Near Future: The Peripheral

The Peripheral - William Gibson

It never crossed Flynne Fisher’s mind that doing a favor for her brother would lead to such upheaval. After all, she was just doing security for some online game – or so she thought. This game was different, though: for one thing, the setting was… disturbingly familiar… and it was more realistic than any game she’d played before – especially the gruesome murder she witnessed. Flash forward a couple of days: word on the street is that there’s a contract out on her brother because someone thinks he saw something he shouldn’t have. What’s weird, though, is that the company who’d originally hired him is coming to his (and Flynne’s) defense with some pretty advanced tech. Turns out that her virtual reality trip hadn’t been into a game, it had been to the future. Or more accurately, to a future – you know: time-travel paradoxes and all that.

Seventy-some years out, dabbling in past “continua” has become a hobby of sorts, and Flynne’s world is for one hobbyist the equivalent of those miniature rooms your aunt makes with tiny objects from Hobby Lobby. Or it was – suddenly, it’s become a battleground between good and evil, with the bad guys hell-bent on getting rid of the Fishers and the good guys hoping Flynne can finger the murderer she’d seen and, in the process, untangle a rather tangled web of deception in one particular future. That’s why they have her projecting her personality up a connection to their future, where she inhabits The Peripheral.

Reading William Gibson has become a bit easier in the age of the internet: I used to have to lay down the book, go to my library and dig through my reference collection whenever I came across some of his strange offhand references. Now, when I wonder what Luke 4:3† says or what the heck is a “thyalcine††,” I can just google it. It makes reading Gibson faster, though no less fascinating. Talk about your eclectic education!

William Gibson, photo: Gonzo Bonzo (wikimedia commons)

Gibson does not make reading his novels easy, which is one reason why they’re so darned interesting. When you read novels like Idoru or Spook Country, there’s no expository text to explain everything for you, unlike the reams of explanation used to pad out James Patterson's potboilers. Readers need to pick up clues from context or use their noodles. A case in point: the “jackpot” event – good, classic scifi fans will hark back to a ‘50s-era Robert Heinlein short story “The Year of the Jackpot,” which (if you know the short story and protagonist Potiphar Breen) is a darned good clue about what apparently happened.

All good things come to those who wait – Gibson ultimately explains both the jackpot and the reference to Luke 4:3 as he ping-pongs back and forth between Flynne’s present and the post-semi-apocalyptic future he’s populated with kleptocrats and equipped with nanotech and a giant polymer island build with the detritus of the North Pacific Gyre. William Gibson has admitted publicly that he’s not particularly techno-savvy, so readers should expect his future tech to be (mostly) reasonable extrapolations of current tech – VR, 3D printers, etc. – but shouldn’t look for nitty-gritty details. Instead, readers should figure on the occasional snarky little joke or a departure into an interesting fantasy:

“The red Lego, spherical, now rolled slowly from behind the bowl of oranges, to join, becoming rectilinear again, with the tiniest of clicks, its yellow companion. He wondered what shape it had taken to get back up the table leg.”

Encapsulated within that one passage is the power of William Gibson’s writing in The Peripheral: attention to tiny details that just can’t occur – at least not in the world as we know it today.

† "And the devil said unto him, If thou be the Son of God, command this stone that it be made bread."
†† Thyalcine: a doglike carnivorous marsupial with stripes across the rump, found only in Tasmania.

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