With The Peripheral (2014), William Gibson has returned to his wheelhouse: an incisive and disturbing vision of the near-future with engaging protagonists and sharp, snappy writing.
Whether it is the hero of the book, Flynne (reprising a steampunk role originated by Y.T. in Neal Stephenson’s Snowcrash) providing a fantastically sympathetic and engaging character or the amazing notion of a server that, when logged into, generates a new splinter in the timeline of history, or Gibson’s prescient take on the possible near-term future (a series of unrelated, but interlocked, disasters that decimate the poor while leaving the privileged largely untouched), The Peripheral delivers.
The one shortcoming for me were the initial chapters: it took a while to figure out the alternating narratives, which are also temporally displaced, but (a) that may have been due to my being initially inattentive and (b) once Gibson hits his stride, you won’t want to put it down.
Gibson remains an important voice in contemporary science fiction: it’s pulp, but it’s smart, writerly, entertaining pulp.
#WhatIWishICouldDo
Gibson is fantastic at making economical choices in his balance of dialog, characterization, and description. He creates worlds and scenes that are viscerally real with a minimum of words: scenes that I would stretch to pages he communicates in sentences.