The New York Times bestselling author of Neuromancer and Zero History presents a fast-paced sci-fi thriller that takes a terrifying look into the future...

Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go.

Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby.

Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad.

Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.

Length: 486 pages	Word Wise: Enabled	Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled
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Product details

File Size: 1596 KB
Print Length: 486 pages
Page Numbers Source ISBN: B01LTHXL1M
Publisher: Berkley (October 28, 2014)
Publication Date: October 28, 2014
Language: English
ASIN: B00INIXKV2
Text-to-Speech: Enabled

X-Ray:

Enabled

Word Wise: Enabled
Lending: Not Enabled
Screen Reader: Supported

Enhanced Typesetting: Enabled

Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #87,947 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #353 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Time Travel
- #412 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Thrillers > Technothrillers
- #491 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Science Fiction & Fantasy > Science Fiction > Hard Science Fiction

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Daniel S. Palter

Best Gibson novel in some time.

November 1, 2014

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Excellent book but perhaps not a wise choice for your first Gibson novel. The first few chapters will only make sense in retrospect. The plot as a whole does not fully make sense at all. Prior readers of Gibson are used to this. Gibson does flashy technodystopia and this is his best in some time [which given the high quality of the worst of his writing should be a sign]. Fast pace, a few good characters, an excellent talent for dialog and setting. The ending won't exactly resolve anything but its so much fun I doubt anyone will care. A wonderful melange of time travel, printed matter, nano tech, declining Atlantic civilization, kleptocracy, postmodern art and ever so much more. The politics are mildly left but not to the point of preachy. The two worlds created in the novel cry out for more stories. Remains to be seen if we shall get them. If not I am quite sure the author will invent new worlds to amaze and amuse me.

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Michael Glaviano

Fast-paced, challenging, and excellent

January 12, 2015

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As usual, Gibson drops you into the middle of his made-up-but-all-too-real world and expects you to figure things out. Though his style jars me every time I pick up one of his books, I am invariably drawn in by his writing.

"Peripheral" is a near-future story. The middle class has crumbled into chronic, under-employed poverty. The characters take advanced (but believable) tech for granted, and they bend that tech in creative ways to help them scrape together enough money to get by. Without belaboring it, he lets us know that not only are "real" jobs scarce but that the economy has taken a hyper-inflationary hit. Without ever going into detail, he lets us know that vertically-integrated, big-box enterprises completely dominate commerce. And most all levels of government are "owned" by moneyed interests. None of this is belabored. It's just there.

Particularly interesting in this novel is Gibson's treatment of family. Two of the core characters are a brother and a sister. A cousin and an ill mother also figure prominently. They care about and do their best to stand by each other. There's a lot of good-natured teasing and well-meant ragging. Related to this is his use of friendship throughout the story. There are a lot of people in this book who care about each other, who stand by each other without considering selfish behavior. That's not to say that the characters are all "nice people." Many of them aren't; and several of them are seriously damaged both physically and psychologically. Many, if not most, are ethically compromised to varying degrees.

Oh, and action. I mustn't forget that. The book included quite a bit of action as well as an interesting take on something very like time travel.

As with Gibson's other novels, I soon had the slang internalized such that I scarcely noticed it. The angular writing style seemed to smooth out and morph into something intuitive and fast. I enjoyed this one a great deal -- but I guess you already knew that, didn't you?

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Amazon Customer

The Master returns

September 9, 2017

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Gibson has been a visionary from the beginning, from the Sprawl Trilogy and on, always peeling back the layers of how the human animal might interact with sufficiently advanced technology, art, each other, and sometimes a combination of all three. The Peripheral brings Gibson back firmly into the fold of speculative fiction with the time travel concept turned on its head, and shaken down for loose change. Along with his familiar back drops of corporate nation-states and deadly guns for hire, we find Flynne, a poor town girl, taking care of her mom, and gaming once in a while. Her talents in this arena get her noticed as she fills in for her brother one night running interference in what appears to be an online video game using drones. She sees something she shouldn't, and things unravel quickly from there in a manner that only Gibson could have envisioned. I hope this is the start of another trilogy. This new world of his is fascinating, and I'd like to play in it a while longer.

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Greg

she's not afraid of big words like telepresence. She's pragmatic

January 20, 2015

Verified Purchase

' "You're used to telepresence, then," Lev said.
"We call it getting a haircut," Flynne said, giving him a look as she got to her feet, "back in frontier days." '

This short exchange encapsulates many aspects of the book. From it we learn--or, rather, have confirmed--that: Flynne is a mite touchy about being condescended to. While self-educated, she's not afraid of big words like telepresence. She's pragmatic, defining telepresence in very practical terms: getting a haircut. She is self-aware, able to imagine how she looks to someone from her future ("frontier days"). Lev, in contrast, is socially inept and ignorant of his past - an ordinary guy, in other words. Gibson has created real people, not just mouthpieces for the author, as is sadly too common in science fiction.

Telepresence. Gibson expects us, the readers, to know what this means. If you're not up with the play in technology, or you can't work out what the word might mean, then this isn't your book: Gibson is not a writer who spoon-feeds his readers. Personally, I like that, but I can sympathize with those who find it all a bit bewildering. That bears repeating: if you're looking for some light entertainment with a few gee-whiz gadgets thrown in, then look elsewhere. This book is about other things, one of them being the social effects of technological change.

Telepresence? We call it getting a haircut. Cutting hair is yet another job outsourced in Flynne's time - a job that many readers might have thought is impossible to outsource, since it involves intimate personal contact. So: if hair cutting can be outsourced, then what can't be? What would that do to employment and society in advanced countries? Gibson shows us glimpses of a changed world in our near future, and invites us to fill in the picture ourselves. To get the most out of this book, you'll have to work.

More than a few of the secondary characters in the book, while having their own motivations and histories, are there in part to allow Gibson to ruminate on the darker parts of human nature--heedlessness, narcissism, the impulse to self-destruction at both the personal and global levels--and on how we cope (or don't cope) with the resulting mess.

On one level the plot is comically thin, a sketch of a noir detective story embellished with one or two sci-fi cliches like the Everett (many worlds) interpretation of quantum physics. It also has many glaring holes. I think that by creating such a plot Gibson is saying something about narrative in general: in reality, what happens just doesn't make sense. We're just made to think that it does. Or maybe Gibson just isn't interested in such trivia as a plausible storyline. Whichever, the plot's deficiencies really don't diminish the book at all: you can enjoy each scene, and the characters and world-building are more than satisfying.

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