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William Gibson imagines worlds of such otherworldly familiarity that it almost seems that they will, they must, exist – if not coincident in time with our world, only in a parallel space, then in some nexus-branched alternative future.
The concepts he has invented to occupy the worldscape of his latest book, “The Peripheral” are like that; at once outlandish and futuristically weird, but simultaneously familiar, and well before the end of the book you will find yourself accepting the reality of communication between the “then” and “now” of a timestream which originates in an almost-familiar, not-so-distant future as a given.
In a presumably late-21st Century/early-22nd Century timeframe, somewhere in the rural South of the United States of America, in a world that is slowly going to hell but in which technology which is now, in the early 21st Century, in its infancy, is commonplace and well advanced from the state in which we know it, Burton, a disabled veteran of a high-tech advanced tactics unit of the U.S. Marine Corps, asks his sister to stand in for him on a job. The job, presumably, is beta-testing an advanced video game, but when Flynne, on her stand-in shift, witnesses a bizarre and disturbingly achieved murder, their familiar, if dysfunctional, world starts to spin out of control.
Gibson drops you into the story with no preamble, and “The Peripheral” is definitely a “keep reading, hang on, and catch up” experience. The relationship to the world of his earlier book, “Mona Lisa Overdrive”, struck me early on. The prevalence of advanced cyber-science in the worlds of both books is strikingly similar, and familiar.
In a year that has seen an ample abundance of more or less routine dystopian near future speculative fiction novels – of which the least admirable was a highly touted debut novel about “word viruses” – William Gibson’s “The Peripheral” is an exceptional bit of literary fresh air. It represents the long overdue return of not only one of speculative fiction’s most important intellectuals, but also, one of the most noteworthy writers of our time, regardless of genre. Reading a William Gibson novel can be a difficult, and challenging, task, and his latest is no exception, since he takes readers on a whirlwind tour into the future twice; the first set approximately three to four decades into the future, and the other, the early 22nd Century. But it is a task well worth taking by the reader, since Gibson has some interesting things to say about time travel, robotics, nanotechnology, and corruption – corporate, financial and government – on a global scale, through a tale that is nearly as dark and depressing as the one recounted in “Neuromancer” – his award-winning debut novel that noted critic and fantasy writer Lev Grossman regards as the most important novel of our time – while relying on literary techniques introduced in “Virtual Light”, and especially, “Idoru”, and perfected in “Pattern Recognition”, “Spook Country” and “Zero History”, such as terse, often fragmented, sentences, brief chapters, and realistic dialogue that, for some readers, may be faint literary echoes of the hallucinatory prose written in his early “Sprawl Trilogy” novels “Neuromancer” and “Count Zero”.
“The Peripheral” is Gibson’s best work of speculative fiction since “Idoru”.