Staff Pick
Fans of William Gibson will be excited as he goes back to the future in The Peripheral, mixing and matching a near-future America with a further-future London. Through it all, Gibson makes his usual observations on class, technology, climate, and art. All this, and there's cosplay! Recommended By Doug C., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
The New York Times bestselling author of such high-tech dystopian thriller[s]”* as Neuromancer and Zero History presents his first novel since 2010. Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural near-future America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which shes trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives, or tries to, 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 shes 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 arent 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.
Burtons been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. Hes got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the games 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 Wilfs, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.
*New York Magazine
Review
"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
Synopsis
William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010's
New York Timesbestselling
Zero History.
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 has to go out, but there's a job hes supposed to do a job Flynne didn't know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: 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. That's all there is to it. He's offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn't what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.
About the Author
William Gibson lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. He is the author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrows Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, and Distrust That Particular Flavor.