The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition

I have a confession to make. I've never read NEUROMANCER. I was one of those who had to be pulled kicking and screaming into the cyberpunk era. I didn't want to read cyberpunk at all. Not only didn't I read NEUROMANCER, but I didn't read the other really big cyberpunk novel of the day, Neal Stephenson's SNOW CRASH. I wanted my space ships, I wanted my aliens, I wanted my galactic space opera. What the heck was this cyberpunk stuff, and why was it getting in my science fiction?I swore I was never going to like cyberpunk. I read Gibson's COUNT ZERO and VIRUAL LIGHT. I read Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE. I decided I didn't like the style OR the subject matter. Heck, I even tried to read THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, by both Sterling and Gibson, and I decided that steampunk (yes, that was steampunk, but no one seems to credit it that way these days, at least not that I hear) was a waste of my time too.That was 30 years ago. Times change. People change. Writers change. Genres change. I don't mind reading steampunk these days - I feel that some of it is really pretty good. I absolutely loved ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson, although I generally don't read his books because they are monstrous doorstops that I don't have time for.And I tried Gibson again.THE PERIPHERAL was being talked about on podcasts, in blogs, and everywhere else that I pay attention to in the field. It was getting good reviews, and it was being hailed as "Gibson's return to undeniable science fiction". I was dubious of that last statement, as I didn't think anything else he wrote was science fiction, so how can he return to it?But as I said, things change. And since this was the year I was going to get ahead of the game by reading novels that would assuredly be on the Hugo ballot, I figured I would give it a try (and as far as getting ahead of the game, well, we all know how THAT turned out).And wouldn't you know, I liked it.THE PERIPHERAL takes place in a not too distant future. Well, I should rephrase that. It takes place in two futures: one not too distant, and one a century or so further on. The near-ish future, in America, or some form of it, is a bit of a mess. There's the drug trade, an updated version of what the reader presumes is WalMart, and a very bleak economy. The further along future that we see is in London, after an event called The Jackpot had killed off a great portion of the world's population.We begin in the near future. Flynne lives with her brother Burton and her mother. Burton is a military veteran who suffers from trauma he suffered while serving in the U.S. Military. He is getting aid from the U.S. government because he's not supposed to be able to work. He has, however, found a job beta testing some video game software for a Colombian outfit called Coldiron. One day he goes off to be part of a protest group against a religious organization, and asks Flynne to cover for him on the job for a few days. His job in the game is that of security. He tells Flynne to keep an eye on a particular tower and fend off little nano-paparazzi type devices. However, on the second day of the job she witnesses a murder, and something doesn't seem quite right to her about it. And off we go into the story.THE PERIPHERAL is a murder mystery, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so pure and simple, since we *are* talking a) science fiction, and b) science fiction by William Gibson. It's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that the murder was in the future, a future life is also stark and bleak - never mind just a bit weird - due to The Jackpot. One of the devices that the future has is some sort of mysterious server, built by the Chinese (but never really visited in detail or explained at all in the book) that allows residents of that future to travel back and interact with various different pasts, which may or may not be their own past (It really is all a bit wonky but kind of cool. I didn't let myself get too distracted by the lack of details or even the not quite understanding of how pasts and that particular future relate. It was better that way.), call "stubs". People who do that are called "continua enthusiasts", and while in the novel we don't much deal with them, the people we deal with do have to go back to the past to try and figure out what they can about the murder that took place.I'll tell you what - this is a really cool story with some really neat concepts. While the idea of telling a story that takes place in two separate times is not new, the way of the two timelines interacting with each other is new - at least to me. Yeah, it's a bit of "hand-wavium", but hand-wavium is a time honored tradition in our field, and it is acceptable some times and not in others. I think it works well here. The future is populated with a bunchof interesting - at least to me - characters, including an investigator, Lowbeer, who reminds me a lot of Paula Myo from Peter F. Hamilton's novels.The novel is not without its faults, minor though they be. The first 100 pages or so (yes, I looked while I was listening to the audiobook) were a bit of a slog to get through. Gibson introduces new terminology that makes readers scratch their heads for awhile until they figure out just what it is he is talking about (although it could be argued that a science fiction reader, especially one who reads Gibson, should not only be used to it by now, but shouldn't need anything spelled out for them anyway), and it does take awhile to figure out that Gibson is switching back and forth between two timelines. However, once all that stuff is squared away and the reader figures out the basics, the story moves along at a pretty good pace, and is a good read. The conclusion was, for me, satisfying. Gibson wraps everything up fairly nicely with a little bow, which is something many writers don't do these days (although it can be argued that this is a standalone novel - for which I am grateful - and he darn well should tie things up nicely).As far as the narration goes, well, I didn't think anyone was going to top R.C. Bray, the narrator of THE MARTIAN. I was wrong. Lorelei King was magnificent. She handled the voices of the different characters terrifically, in my opinion. The pacing was terrific, and I loved the accent. She didn't intrude upon the story; rather, she enhanced it from the very beginning. I would hope I run across her in other audiobooks I listen to in the future.NEUROMANCER was one of those novels that comes along once a generation that changes the face of the field of science fiction, at least that's what I'm told. I will have to go back and read it, 30+ years after the fact. THE PERIPHERAL is not that kind of novel, but it doesn't have to be. It just is what it is - a terrific book.

It's been too long since I read William Gibson, and The Peripheral reminded me of everything I love about his books: the effortless extrapolation of present day technology into future trends, the way he blends genre elements into his storytelling while also feeling like speculative fiction (here, there's equal bits noir, mystery, and action movie), and more than that, his crisp, tight prose. Explaining The Peripheral in a short paragraph is challenging, but here goes: in one timeline, a PR agent witnesses a horrific crime and finds himself cleaning up the mess, which includes a stub - a quantum computing server that allows the owner to communicate with the past, creating a timeline that splinters off from the original line at the point of contact. Sliding back and forth across these two periods, Gibson creates a sprawling conspiracy that's working to cover up an assassination, but also dives into the mysterious "jackpot" that happens somewhere between the two periods, and left the "future" world in dire straits. If all of that sounds like a lot, well, it is, and I'm not sure it all entirely comes together in the end - the ending feels a little anticlimactic, and ultimately feels like there's a lot more story to tell and that I wasn't really sure what the "main" thread of this book was in hindsight. (In the book's defense, it is the first book in a planned trilogy, but typically, Gibson's trilogies are standalone works that connect through characters and themes.) But that didn't keep it from being incredibly gripping throughout as Gibson corkscrews his plots together again and again, nor the way that he brings his usual gripping ideas about where technology could go (the titular peripherals here are a fascinating idea). It's maybe too ambitious, but too much ambition in a book this gripping is something I can live with.

I give up. I would like to like William Gibson, but I cannot see past his writing style. It is painfully and embarrassingly precious. My third attempt to read one of his novels, my third purchased Gibson gob buster, over the years, all of which on paper - as it were - sounded very interesting – crashes again. And the praise he gets! With this one I got past the first page, and thought, "Good! this one is ok so far." Page two brought me to a halt. What initially had been presented as the existential texture of the first encounter with places and persons unknown shifted into the 'cool' of Gibson's apparently endless appetite for fetishising things, products, processes, technologies. It is the tone I can't take. The prose descriptively back-processed to convey the fetishised object to the point of its being pathologically infantile. It lacks a sense of a true voice. As if in search of a non-existent past not a future. So on page two: "He hadn't bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and flexible. You could see the stubs of burnt matches inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette." That is not description, that amounts to a generalised fetishisation of things, but where the need is not any given characters’ need but the authors’. That is childish.484 pages of this. Alongside a rather more readable Empty Hearts – it is going to Help the Aged.

I love sci-fi and I love William Gibson. I'm not sure how I missed this book when it was published in 2014, but here we are: a tv show brought it to my attention.If you're new to Gibson's books, then whoa, you're in for a ride. He's quite hardcore punk sci-fi and unapologetically doesn't explain things to the reader - you'll eventually pick things up by nuance. Or not.If you've chosen to read this book because of the tv show, then you should know that the book is about 75% completely different from the show (at least up to episode 6). While the show is mostly about Flynne, her brother, Netherton and Nuland, the book's main heroes are Lowbeer (who's not even in the show until episode 6), Conner, Flynne, Netherton and to some extent Macon.So, it's best to treat the tv show and the book as two separate entities who just happen to share a few characters and some events in the same locations. There's no point comparing them because they're both good, just in different ways.So, is the book any good? If, like me, you're a Gibson fan, then yes, it's absolutely brilliant. He drops the reader into worlds, ideas, concepts and morals that are fresh and so perfectly described but barely explained, that it really feels as though you're exploring it alongside Flynne and Conner. If you dislike ambiguity, then it could be a bit frustrating.I'm having a hard time understanding the motivations for all the characters (unlike the tv show where some of them are just power-hungry and bad); and occasionally the internal logic doesn't make sense: how is Wilf an alcoholic in a world where all medical problems are fixed instantly by a Medici device? How exactly are the people in the future able to connect to the past? A 'secret Chinese server' is right up there with 'Somehow he came back' when it comes to plastering over gaping plotholes.Overall it's a great read; mind bending and creative. It works well as a companion-piece to the tv series as well.

I’ve not read any William Gibson for a while now, not since Pattern Recognition first hit the shelves back in 2003, but I remember being massively impressed with everything of his I’d read up until that point. As a result, I had high expectations for The Peripheral and I have to say I wasn’t disappointed.The novel opens in near-future rural America, where protagonist Flynne Fisher agrees to take over her brother’s job one night, working as security in a new video game. When she witnesses a particularly gruesome murder on the second night she begins to question whether it’s just a game or something more.Meanwhile, in a post-apocalyptic 22nd Century, publicist Wilf Netherton loses his job after a disastrous assignment and finds himself getting drawn into the mystery surrounding the disappearance of a socialite he has links to.Connecting these two seemingly disparate stories is the continua, a never-explained link between Wilf’s ‘present’ and various points in the ‘past’. Through the use of a mysterious server that’s believed to exist somewhere in China, the denizens of the 22nd Century are able to reach back in to the past, but in doing so they create stubs, new timelines separate and distinct from their own which continue forward at the same rate of temporal progress.It’s an unusual approach to the time-travel trope, and raises a lot of questions about how much of the story is real or imagined within the context of the narrative. The fact that the alleged Chinese server McGuffin that allows contact with the stubs is deliberately kept vague and mysterious even to the denizens of Wilf’s timeline suggests that there’s a lot more going on under the hood of this novel than you realise, and while that could be true of pretty much any novel by Gibson, here the layers of obfuscation feel positively abyssal in depth.As ever, Gibson’s writing here is superlative. The way he weaves the two distinct narratives together is damn near perfect, though he does leave a lot of threads hanging throughout the book. Even by the end of the story, when everything’s been brought together in an adrenaline inducing climax and it’s been revealed who has in fact done it, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered. That this is the first in a new series is in no doubt, but where his earlier works were more-or-less independent of each other, you can’t help but get the impression this new trilogy is going to prove to be very interconnected by the turn of the last page of the final book.All in all it’s fair to say Gibson hasn’t lost any of his talent for telling stories. This is cyberpunk for the post-cyberpunk world, and definitely worth a read if you’re a fan of the genre.

Imagine that an eighties band you used to like released a 35-year reunion album, and it turned out not to be entirely terrible.“The Peripheral” is a hybrid cyberpunk/time travel story told from two (mostly) alternating third-person-limited points of view looking at each other from either end of an unspecified period of future history.The content is pure William Gibson fan service and almost criticism-proof. You knew what to expect when you bought your ticket, so for the most part you just have to put up and shut up.It’s a chaotic exercise in nano tech, stealth tech, cyber-displaced consciousness, guns-and-ammo fetishism, and Black Ops mumbo jumbo. There’s probably only one character – an actual cop – who isn’t a creatively dysfunctional but, like, toterly kewl, loner.It takes a while to get going, but once all the pieces are on the board and your reading ear tunes in to the slightly forced writing style it hops along enjoyably enough.The real weakness is in the structure.The plot is a bad day for air traffic control at Deus Ex Machina Airlines.It’s told in a a hundred-odd, pointlessly tiny, supposedly smartly titled, chapters.One of the reasons it’s slow to start is because it’s trying to get away with delivering two future worlds at either end of a “look but don’t touch” Google Hangout, without info-dumps, and just ends up being oblique.One of the pair of PoV voices has a yoof-full, edgy, broken “street” quality that’s not entirely successful, partly because it’s trying to leverage the benefits of first and third person and ends up neither fish nor fowl, and partly because that voice bleeds inappropriately all over the other PoV who isn’t either yoof or “street”.There’s a climax without a real nailed-down conclusion. Despite striking down upon the eventually revealed panto villain with great vengeance and furious anger, at least one key dark side character escapes with just a stern telling off. When I reached the last couple of chapters and had to keep being careful not to tap the “buy the next-in-series” banner in the Kindle app, I realised with a sinking heart that it’s because it’s not the standalone I thought it was.All that said, if it comes up again at a 99p deal, there are way worse ways to send yourself to sleep for a week.

Like many reviews I found this unreadable - but I had seen many reviews urging people to stick with it and it would all slot into place. I read the full 484 pages. I still don't really know what happened; every couple of pages I was dropped into a new scenario with unexplained words and phrases, with characters that were never developed doing things I did not understand their motives to do. Just one hot mess.I have purchased other Gibson books which currently sit unread on my shelves and they may remain that way after this.