703 pages
English language
Published Nov. 7, 2015
Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton asks Flynne to take over a job he's supposed to do. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. Work a perimeter around the image of a tower building; little buglike things turn up, he's supposed to get in their way, edge them back. What she sees, though, isn't what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder....
A pile of very interesting ideas, strung together with badly paced and incoherent plotting. The sci Fi concepts are fun and the writing is spare and engaging, but neither the plot nor the characters quite come together enough.
Compared to the TV show, this book has better sci fi coherence but its representation of the near-future Appalachia is a lot worse and less fun.
Content warning Spoilers for the plot of The Peripheral (novel)
This novel is based on some great concepts, but overall I don't think it did enough with them.
The premise is that the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic future have the ability to communicate with the past, which creates alternate timelines that they can continue to communicate with. They can recruit people in these alternate timelines (which they call "stubs") to control drones in their present, including humanoids that they call "peripherals".
This seems like a setup to explore wealth inequality and imperialist exploitation - the stub would be labour-rich while the future is depopulated - and it does have an element of that. However, it is portrayed more as a hobby, an intellectual exercise to see if anything can be done to avoid the apocalypse in the stub by making advanced technology available to it. The action of the novel is incidental to the nature of the stub or its relationship to the future - an accidental witnessing of a murder which makes it a battleground between forces that are alien to it, over matters that don't concern it.
In the end, this rich-man's fancy is unambiguously beneficial to the people living in the stub, and that's where it's left. Yay billionaire philanthropy, I guess.
I also found it quite difficult to follow what was going on initially. It starts out with one of my pet-peeves - a "game" that does not seem like something that an experienced gamer such as the protagonist would plausibly find entertaining: flying a drone around and bumping other drones out of the way for some unspecified reason. The TV show does much better with this by having the neural control tech for peripherals available in the stub from the beginning, and having it used in a way that could plausibly be an action-adventure game. But, this isn't a review of the TV show :P
Underwhelmed. Nice ideas. Just didn't like it.
A wonderful world to visit, a classic Gibson story that leaves you gasping "that escalated quickly"
Reading out of order sometime has benefits. Finding out more about Flynne and Wilf from the original sources was quite satisfying actually. As with The Agency, this book also ended with far too much an unsatisfactory rush after an intricate build up. Thereโs a feeling almost that together they form the foundation for what the story is going to end up being; whatโs going on with Lowbeer and who are the Aunties?
I re-read the beginning--which really was more solid than I thought originally. The animated tattoos are a very futuristic-but-plausible idea from this one. Gibson continues the idea of video games being a very substantial part of the future economy.
Still not sure why Peripherals themselves were supposed to be interesting?
I liked the character of Ash--she was just steampunk enough for me without going too far. The birdsong double-encoded language was cool.
Part whodunit, part dystopian, part time travel, part thriller, and all Gibson. Very nice.
I tried to like this book, I wanted to like this book, I really did. As someone who likes technology, and is interested in ideas related to the future of technology, I liked Neuromancer. But this one... I just couldn't get into the story. The concepts he was trying to get across got in the way for me. I couldn't really relate to the characters, I didn't get to really feel like I cared about them because there was too much other stuff in the way. The world didn't really come alive for me.
I do appreciate that he wrote a strong woman protagonist really well, so I added a star for that.
The first time I read this book I only gave it 3 stars. Maybe I found it confusing and thus unsatisfying? This time round I saw what he was doing, and I admired his craft much more. This is maybe a 4.5 star book, since there is some confusing stuff in there that I think narratively could be drawn out, furthermore the pacing is unbalanced and I wanted to know more about what happens after the story (a good sign I suppose โ leave them wanting more โ and potentially a good setup for a sequel). Speaking of sequels, I am moving on to [b:Agency|34943643|Agency|William Gibson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1493829667l/34943643.SY75.jpg|56213188] next.
Frolicking thriller with a clever timeline and commentary on mass surveillance and post-scarcity. Perhaps too pat, but fun.
Nobody writes like William Gibson.
Gibson goes back to his excellent techno-thriller future-dystopian novelist self.
Another incredible book from Gibson. Great big ideas made manageable with his gentle touch. Prose as pretty as ever. Goddamn, I love this.
Probably some of Gibson's most lyrical writing ever, which is really saying something.
