The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 1)

If you've never read Gibson before, this is NOT the place to start.I remember the first time I read Neuromancer. Jeeze, like 30 years ago now. Reading Neuromancer and its often dense, cinematic prose often made me with for a glossary with the book, like there had been when I read my older brother's late 60s paperback copy of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. But Burgess' was using Anglicized Russian as British English slang in that book -- you really needed the glossary.For Gibson, everything is written in English, so you get no glossary. You have to figure out the meanings of new/invented/esoteric terms from the context of the prose. Now, it's got it's confusing, hallucinatory aspects that make it akin to reading Burroughs sometimes (but without all the drugs and homosexual sex). But Burroughs' stuff also was frustrating to read because of the cut-up, disjointed narrative style. Gibson's stuff is far more tightly plotted and less hallucinatory.Figuring out the meanings of terms from the prose and context is less an issue in this novel than in some of Gibson's previous novels (like The Sprawl trilogy novels). But it is definitely much more of an issue here than it was with in the last three "Bigend" trillogy novels combined.I did not have a problem figuring out terms/actions from the context with this novel. For people who are already aware of topics as disparate but technologically reliant as social media's geolocation capabilities, social media mood indication/tracking, advancements in 3D printing, and concepts such as string/mbrane theories of physics (in a PBS TV kind of way) and possible parellel multiple universes, this book should not be difficult to read.For everyone else, yeah... it will be a problem.I recently had a friend -- who hadn't re-read any of Gibson's first 3-6 novels since she originally read them, 30-ish years ago -- complain about 3 things with respect to this book. I, however, recently re-acquired ALL of his books in ebook format, after having lost paperback and hardcover copies over the years. So I was in a unique position to respond to her arguments.First, she said the first 100 pages of The Peripheral were unnecessarily dense. My response to that was: no, not really, unless you've forgotten how he *used* to write. Because this is not a new style for him -- it's more a return to form.Second, she objected to the fact that under all the scifi trappings, it's "just a murder mystery." Well, you could say any of his previous novels had, "under the trappings," some fairly routine pulp-ish or noir-ish plots. Criminal pulled in/tempted by just "one last job." Corporate espionage and extraction of human workers who represent intellectual capital to these corporations. That kind of thing.In my opinion, there are two mysteries in this novel: the murder mystery (which is the obvious mystery) and the underlying, shadow mystery, which is revealed in dribs and drabs until very near the end: the myster of The Jackpot -- what it is, how it happened, who it affected.Ironically, the biggest mystery -- communication between people of one near future multiverse, and the people of a far future multiverse -- is simply set up as a given. (If anything in this novel is a deus ex machina, I suppose that is). So the mystery is never explained.Third and last, she objected to what she felt was a Disney-ish happy ending. But, I argued, virtually all of Gibson's otherwise highly dystopian visions of the future end similarly: the bad guys don't entirely win, and the good guys don't entirely lose. Which is, I guess, just another way of saying the bad guys kind of lose, and the good guys kind of win. But one senses that the struggle and lives of the characters continue after you finish the book, and nothing feels too deus ex machina (except, in this novel, maybe some of the givens).Let me put it this way: If you already know and pretty much love Gibson's previous stuff, I don't think this will disappoint.If, however, Gibson's writing (especially the early stuff) put you off, then you'll probably hate this novel, too.I loved it. Gibson has always been so expertly, specifically, and hauntingly able to describe the nostalgia of anachronistic characters and to chart the narratives of those people whose changing personal circumstances have left them with uncertain footing in either a not entirely friendly world, or an outright hostile one, as they try to secure some piece of stability and/or security for themselves amid an often constantly changing landscape. He's always written relatable and often quite compelling heroines, the vast majority of whom were not stereotypical scifi babes.He has also always extrapolated from current and historical sociopolitical and economical trends -- especially with respect to technological innovation -- to provide a glimpse of the growing, ever-sharpening class divisions that our world has rapidly devolved into. Much of what he presented as mere backstory or incidental detail in his Sprawl trilogy novels (and even in later workrs) has come to pass. He obviously has class politics, and to me, Gibson seems to be one of those ex-working class intellectuals who never lost touch with the fact that -- had he never become successful as a writer -- he'd probably would have worked some kind of blue collar or civil servant/wage slave type job his whole life, because that's what he was headed for.So he has remarkable sympathy for those square-peg-round-hole drones who get caught up in things larger than themselves, especially those who've had a taste of "the good life" and then otherwise blew it, lost it, or had it somehow snatched away. Yet he never comes across as overtly or explicity adhering to any 'ism;' he never comes across from that kind of tiresome first-raised pro-blue-collar/almost anti-intellectual pride, either. That's probably because, for many of his protagonists, it's their intellect, their brainy skills, that got them out of whatever backwater, wrong-side-of-town situation they were originally born into.The way he writes his dystopian futures -- which are all merely extrapolations of things that are already true now -- "it is what it is." There's no agenda-pushing by Gibson, it's just a very dry recitation of the surrounding details that gradually weave into a whole where you see how the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, and you come to realize that is what we all would observe ourselves about our current world, if we were only paying attention.So when one of his underdog protagonists finally achieves some level of security, you feel like it's been really earned... and much of the time, those underdogs are trying to pull another person or two or more up with them, or sometimes, enlighten an entire group even as they merely pursue their own trajectory.It's that warmth and strange optimism amid all the doomy gloomy dystopia that has always kind of made Gibson's stuff moody, haunting, and ultimately very fulfilling reading for me.These are some of the things I've always really admired about him.

It took me a while to get into this. I started after seeing the show on Amazon. Honestly, the show was better than it’s source material. The characters here are very thinly developed and forgettable, and JN and spouse did a great job at developing those characters and a superior narrative out of the meager narrative bones of this story. The only exception is Ainsley Lowbeer, by far the most interesting character in this story. The plot of this novel is extremely interesting, but the prose is very shallow and overly focused on details, very much a 20th century style of scifi. The details are often tedious and don’t serve to further the story. Thing like describing how a character walks through a room or gets from place to place, which don’t even provide any kind of contextual color to highlight the strangeness of the environment. This is one of the reasons I have always found it so difficult to read Gibson. Also, the narration for the audiobook was TERRIBLE. For a relatively high profile author, you’d think they’d shell out for a voice actor a bit less monotone. Anyways, I made it through, and will probably read the next one.

I’m less than a hundred pages into The Peripheral, a book I’ve been looking forward to for a long time: a William Gibson science fiction novel.Gibson is unique, a true visionary, a major first poet and creator of both the cyberpunk genre and the term “cyberspace.” His visions have been co-opted by both Madison Avenue and Hollywood in the same way that the visuals of J.G. Ballard’s childhood memories of China fleshed out his Empire of the Sun, to then pass through Spielberg’s film adaptation and out into our advertising visuals and all other graphic media. And like the late Ballard (an admitted influence), Gibson can write arresting sentences and deliver authentic strangeness. His metaphors, descriptions, and observations are often quoted and often hard to forget.(It must be noted that cyberpunk is largely dead due to substance of its inherent truth – the human-technology interface and its results – having been absorbed into everything, much like sugar in American food. The author has said, “It seems to me that we all live today in a sort of partial condition of ‘Internetness,’ and daily less partially.”)Gibson’s last two novels were set in modern times, yet the poetic sensibility serving his concepts made the here-and-now feel creepy, surreal, and lacking in innocence. The Peripheral, on the other hand, is solid science fiction, where much is unfamiliar.The story is set in two timelines, the first a near future that intersects with a second some seventy years later, this one defined by an event called the jackpot, a world-changing convergence of slow-growing global maladies. The first timeline’s characters are siblings living in a depressed rural town in the American South where the main economy is drugs. Burton is a Marine specialist with a PTS-like disorder; his sister Flynne is a professional gamer hiring out to others, but with an acquired distaste for “shooters.” Burton is hired by a faceless entity to Beta test a virtual security game, but farms the job out for two nights to his skilled sister who witnesses a horrific murder in the environment. “It’s just a game,” she says. It’s not.Flynne is greatly disturbed by the violence she witnesses, as a mentally healthy person should be. This makes her unusual, if not as a sympathetic viewpoint character, but in the gaming world, centered largely as it is around testosteronic endeavors that desensitize its players to killing.Inhabiting the second timeline are a wealthy Russian layabout, his private security team, a performance artist (for lack of a better description), her publicist, her sister, and an elderly policewoman, one of whom had originally hired Burton. This timeline is uncrowded and, oddly, historically unconnected to the first. I shouldn’t say more because as of this writing I haven’t yet finished the book.So why would I write a review now? Because the initial setup to Gibson’s story is itself so good that’s it’s better than most books out there.Now I’ve finished it, and if you’re interested in where our civilization is very likely going – or if you just like to read – you should try this book.The novel isn’t an easy read at first. SF writers generally drop you into their worlds without explaining the furniture in a direct manner; doing so is awkward. Instead you figure it out, and how long that takes depends on the author’s mercy and how experienced you are with the genre; for example, connecting the author’s “fab” to “fabricating” (as from a 3D printer) will possibly help you understand, and a “moby” high in the clouds would probably be a dirigible, right? But connecting “stub” to “a new and divergent branch of time” is impossible until the author feels like helping you. Commenting on this learning curve, Gibson says in a Jonathan Sturgeon interview, “I knew that some readers would be unwilling to put up with it.” He also knows “that a certain kind of reader, one with a second cultural level of acquired skills, would be right at home.” And let’s remember that this big book with its huge concepts is part murder mystery, however bizarre or complex, so being left in the dark is essential to its enjoyment.Gibson has populated his work with more and more women over the course of his career and deepened their characters to full realism, but his casts tend to the masculine regardless of gender. Judging by their responses, these women, while seemingly bestowed with all the feminine depth that can be extended to a reader, move through his plotting under a shadow of noir that darkens all his work and thus mutes most overt emotion. The richness is indeed there but, as in the work of so many male authors, it’s off the page. A Gibson world can be outright brutal, or at the least, tense with a strangeness rendered in incredible tactile detail, and although his women survive in these worlds, they do so seemingly at the expense of the maternal instinct.As a visionary, I see a line that extends to Gibson from Samuel R. Delany, another unique stylist, writer of uncanny sentences, and one of the first presenters of the cyber trope of “jacking in” (interfacing a human nervous system with technology). Delany, no stranger to poetry himself, originally came up with a reality, in his Towers series, lived by people unknowingly dreaming in boxes, a concept of course ripped by the Matrix series of blockbuster films forty years later. And although both writers made their mark, Delany’s profound literary influence on the genre is overshadowed by Gibson’s on modern culture as a whole, exploding as it did in the mid-eighties from Neuromancer, his first novel. (Whose virtual reality dataspace was called the Matrix …) It was the right book at the right time, with it’s iconic first sentence: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”Noir indeed.I don’t remember if Gibson’s collar was turned up in the author photo for that book, but it is for this one.