The Peripheral

Gibson's first real foray into Science Fiction since The Bridge trilogy, The Peripheral deals with a kind of time travel and the ability to be able to control an avatar-like android (a peripheral) with your mind. The novel begins at 90 miles and hour and for the first 50 odd pages it's like trying to tune in a radio station. Once you are on his wavelength, though, you find a slickly written, effective techno-thriller that, in bite-size chapters, shuttles you between a near future United States and a Great Britain 70 years further on from that.

Flynne, our protagonist, sits in for her brother one night in what they think is beta testing for a new game. It turns out to be something far more strange and dangerous. Gibson never ties us down to specifics, only that a mysterious server (probably Chinese) has somehow managed to create a data wormhole that allows communication between two different times. This wormhole allows Flynne, her brother and horribly maimed war vet Conner, to control “Peripherals” in the far future. The world there is very different, having been through what is referred to as “the jackpot”, not one single catastrophe, but a slow combination of economic and political events that decimated much of the world's population. Yet the remainder survived and prospered. Technology advanced. Nanobots called “Assemblers” seem to have created a new world that is as much a theme park as a place to live.

The central mystery revolves around Flynne witnessing the murder of a media celebrity in this future world, and the consequences of certain elements in the future trying to manipulate the past to ameliorate the effects of the jackpot. But the future will be different because, as soon as Flynne's world is contacted, it diverges, becomes “a stub”. Things change but stay the same, sort of.

The pace is fast, the prose smooth and to the point. Gibson, when on form, can create superbly readable fiction and this is a step up from his last two novels (the disappointing final instalments of the “Blue Ant” trilogy). Gibson created cyberspace before the internet as we know it even existed. With The Peripheral he's at the cutting edge again. The future may be unwritten, but this is as good a substitute as you're likely to get.

Reviewed at www.fantasyliterature.com.

Confusing. Interesting, but confusing. His 80s/90s work was better.