The Peripheral

By: William Gibson

Narrated by: Lorelei King

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

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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.

©2014 William Gibson (P)2014 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“Spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer and all the maturity and sly wit of Spook Country. It’s brilliant.”—Cory Doctorow

“From page one, The Peripheral ticks and sings with the same controlled, dark energy and effortless grace of language....Like the best of Gibson’s early, groundbreaking work, it offers up the same kind of chewy, tactile future that you can taste and smell and feel on your skin; that you believe, immediately, like some impossible documentary, because the thing that Gibson has always been best at is offering up futures haunted by the past.”—NPR

“[Gibson is] revered not just as a unique and brilliantly talented SF novelist but a social and psychological visionary....[The Peripheral] creates a future that is astoundingly inventive and frighteningly plausible....A wonderful addition to a brilliant oeuvre.”—The Sunday Times (UK)

Intriguing Concept Done Pretty Well

It was an enjoyable and thorough exploration of the concept of multiple universes and possible repercussions of moving between them. To me that alone was worth reading the novel. The story was good enough to see you through this exploration but not much better than that.

I Don’t Know

I’m a huge fan of Gibson, have been since I read Neuromancer. I’m such a big fan, I sent the OED a letter correcting their entry on the cord cyberspace to indicate that it was use in “Burning Chrome” 2 years before it was used in Neuromancer. However, this is hard to listen to. Lorelei King is monotonous and the audio quality is just tinny and flat. It’s hard to listen to. It’s so hard, I couldn’t finish. I’ll be reading the rest of this the old fashioned way, using my own eyes and not ears.

Gibson at his best!

William Gibson is a realistically scary visionary. Such a believable dystopian future!

Exceeded my expectations, as usual.

Narrated with finesse....

A tale of two futures

William Gibson's The Peripheral is a story about a future and another future. Relying on a common patch to avoid temporal paradoxes inherent in even simple communication across time, a technologically advanced, far future communicates and engages with a distinct near future (near in terms of our current timeframe). While the near future has all the hallmarks of a civilization on the edge of collapse, the far future is a post-collapse, depopulated world with too much time and resources on their hands. When the near future becomes a witness to a murder in the far future, various entities vie for domination in both times.

As with most Gibson stories, the sci-fi elements are central, but still manage to take a back seat to the unfolding mystery and the eclectic cast of characters. In this case, in addition to the time travel information flow, nanotechnology and engineered humanoid biorobots are numerous. The central theme is of choices and decisions and how minor changes make all the difference as well as nothing being inevitable.

The narration is quite respectable with an adequate range of voices for both genders. Pacing is slow, but the early sections require close attention to set the two time frames.

Gibson at his best.

The premise of the story sounds like a bad movie, but Gibson delivers as only he can. Don't miss it.

Gibson doesn't disappoint

Complexity is a bit of drag initally with so much going on and so many characters, but it's worth the investment. The world- and character-building is brilliant.

Best Gibson in a long spell

A must read if you have ever enjoyed Gibson. As pathbreaking as the Sprawl trilogy.

The Master

Splendid story. I may listen again to absorb the details. WG is the master of building a future world and immersing you in it. The narrator was superb.

Curious, inventive, prose to die for, and slyly dark and disturbing.

Gibson writes as vibrantly powerful prose as ever, (and perhaps more importantly) this novel is written with both cacklingly excitement, and crisp satire and darkness. The ending particularly is a searing critique wrapped in a bow of happiness. Brilliant. Keep listening to it over and over, and it keeps getting better. Ms. King does a fantastic job.

solid story with a hiccup

I found the story was good just lacked more detail when it came to describing the tech terms used.