The Peripheral

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

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 she's 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 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.

*New York Magazine 

“Gibson's radar is deftly tuned to the changes in the culture that many of us are missing.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“William Gibson can craft sentences of uncanny beauty, and is our great poet of crowds.” San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

“Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.” Details

“His eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen.” The New Yorker

“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

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.