The Peripheral
Ratings142
Average rating3.8
DNF at 89%. Should've done it earlier. I just got tired of being confused all the time
The Peripheral – 4 stars
And I ask myself: was it worth it? I’m not sure I have an answer. I started this as an audiobook and, honestly, I didn’t understand a single thing for several minutes. I looked up the basic plot online to try to help with comprehension, but the neologisms, the weird, unexplained machines, verbs, and concepts were just too much. So I ordered the paperback and slowly made my way through it.
The first 100 pages were incredibly tough, even in print. It got slightly better, but the reading never became smooth. It was always a struggle to stay on top of what was happening. While I initially enjoyed the challenge, I think the author buried an interesting story beneath layers of almost unreadable prose that would test anyone’s patience.
I’m glad I finished it—there are definitely cool and imaginative moments throughout—but if I had known just how much mental effort it would take for a piece of entertaining sci-fi, I might not have started it. The only saving grace was the clean structure of the short chapters.
I can see how the first 40% of the book would be confusing to someone coming in blind, but once things snap into place the short chapters fall away quickly. The climax felt a little underwhelming given the steady increase of intensity leading up to it, but ultimately was still satisfying.
William Gibson's ability to throw curve-balls and create unique, interesting near future worlds that resemble our own just enough to be plausible is clearly displayed in this fantastic story. It'll be interesting to see how Amazon did in turning this into a streaming series, but even more I'm looking forward to reading Agency soon. I will say, The Peripheral might require a rapid-re-read to digest properly.
Prometía muchísimo y se desinfló un poco. Tiene un gran momento mind-blowing y alguno que otro suelto, pero es que la forma de escribir de Gibson me molesta mucho. Se me hace muy pesado en ciertos momentos. Aun así, muy buena novela.
The Peripheral (Jackpot 1) by William Gibson
This book mixes the usual tropes of cyberpunk - out of control capitalism, virtual reality, class division, crime, etc. - and mixes in new ideas - time travel. The book flashes between an impoverished rural setting set perhaps a decade where people are surprisingly sophisticated in their technology, and a setting in England about eighty years in the future after a historical event called the “Jackpot” which has removed 90% of the world's population. The two time zones are connected by a mysterious Chinese server in the future that enables the future to contact the past via the internet. (When this happens, the past diverges from the future, thereby obviating any paradoxes.)
The book opens with a chapter that is pure cyber punk. It is very complicated with terminology and ideas that are not explained and are basically incomprehensible. The story then flips to the “present” where we are introduced to a bunch of Hillbillys with internet connections and mad military skills. The setting here is obviously rural and steeped in poverty, although the Hillbillies seem to have virtual reality equipment and other gewgaws lying around. The chief Hillbilly character is Flynn. She is talked into a job by her brother. The job involves operating a drone to keep paparazzi from photographing an event.What she doesn't know is that the event is in the future and that a future group of friends/investors has been opening businesses in their past/Flynn's present for what were to me very obscure reasons.
In any event, Flynn becomes a witness to a crime in the future. The future is therefore interested in having Flynn identify someone who might have been involved in the crime. Flynn is accommodated in the future by a “peripheral” - an android controlled remotely like a drone. From this vantage point, we get to see more of the future world, which is dangerous in its high tech way.
Flynn's world becomes embroiled in the politics of the future crime. There is another faction with the same technology connected to the same past. In the “present” chapters, there are serial attempts to kill Flynn, which are frustrated by her military friends.
I liked the story, but it had its flaws. It started out incomprehensible and kept a large fog factor throughout. In addition, the character list is far too numerous. I had problems keeping track of who was who and it seemed that Gibson kept adding new characters when there was a plot turn. On the other hand, Gibson does provide a view of a different future than we are used to. The incomprehensibility of the cyber future is a necessary feature of a future we haven't experienced. While the story does unravel many of the main plot points, there are many plot points that weren't resolved. For example, who the heck is the other faction that seems set on killing Flynn? Of course, this is just the first book of a trilogy, so we can expect that these questions will be answered in later books of the trilogy.
I read this book because Amazon is giving this book the mini-series treatment. It may work better as a tightly written television series with fewer characters than it does as a book. I am not saying that this book is not worth reading, but it could have used some editing in my opinion.
Peripheral is what I've come to expect from a William Gibson novel. There are the haves and the have-nots who come together over some intriguing modes of technology and defeat some other more powerful entity or entities that are up to no good. There are mysterious and badass characters, celebrity culture, twists, and a little bit of romance.
As always, Gibson's prose has a hypnotic effect on me. He has a way of giving details to ground you in the story but with an economy of words. The tech described is unfamiliar to me but he has a way of making the strange familiar and sometimes the familiar strange, or at least interesting.
3.5 my first gibson, and a difficult one to review. i think it's necessary to divvy up my rating, because it's a 5-star read in terms of concept and world building, which deserves to be said. it fell short for me both in terms of actual story and character (would give it 3 stars for both of those, maybe). my dad - a real gibson aficionado - tells me this way of building a strange and new and only (very) partially recognisable world, and dropping you into it without a warning or an explanation is a very gibson-y thing to do. i can't confirm or deny that, of course, it being my first gibson, but i can tell it's something he does well. both the world he crafts are fascinating and vast and distinct and both clearly a result of our world, and entirely strange from it. it's hard work, reading this book and trying to keep up with it. i think that's why i enjoyed the middle part the most - i'd worked through the first chunk and finally gotten to a place where i felt a bit more settled in the story and the characters. where i could read a page and was able to place every weird concept without too much trouble (only to be uprooted again during the last chunk, of course). i'm a very character-focused reader. if the characters and their relationships and development are good and interesting, i'll forgive a lot of things. on the other hand, however, if i feel like those things aren't that well developed, i'll always feel there's something distinct lacking in this story. i felt not real connection to any of the characters. i didn't feel like any of them had a real arc throughout the book. i really liked the parts where we got descriptions of wilf and lowbeer and ash's complicated relationship with their future - how they hated it and appreciated it, how they wanted it to be different, how they longed for the past. but in the end, those things we learned about them and their thinking never really seemed to be developed further than those surface feelings. and the story... just left me confused, to be honest. maybe because i wasn't invested in it at all. very possible that that's entirely on me, but i had to read the wikipedia page to get a grasp of why half the story was happening and even that didn't really clear it up for me. again - may be me lacking the braincells, may be gibson dedicating so much to the world that he's missing some of the rest of what the book needed. in the end i'm left feeling like i put a lot of hard work into understanding a book and didn't really end up getting enough out of it to make that hard work feel entirely worth it. and i think now i need something that doesn't make my brain feel like my laptop's cpu when i'm playing sims with all the packs installed
Doesn't read as well as some of his more famous works. However it is an excellent story and one that I think will stand the test of time.
it took me many chapters to begin to understand what was going on in this story. There are still quite a few things that don't make sense to me.
Classic Gibson. Immersive, concept-driven science fiction that looks at today's technology and pushes it just a little bit into the future. Well, that plus time travel, but not the usual type of time travel. Add on top of that some great, interesting characters, and you're left with a great read. It starts fairly slow, but if you stick with it, you'll end up loving it.
More thoughts on this book at https://northerntomorrows.wordpress.com/2015/10/05/the-peripheral-by-william-gibson/
My first Gibson book and I have to say that I really enjoyed this one. I do not have much to complain about at all actually. So I just leave this here as a recommendation. Nice pacing, no overuse of some futuristic english, etc. All just very nice.
I'd be curious to see statistics from kindles and such for how many readers actually get to the end of any of Gibson's books. He always makes the first half so goddamn confusing. But if you stick with it, the rewards are plenty.
I don't know how Gibson does his research or synthesizes his ideas but I imagine that he takes one long look at the internet and then goes on to assemble a Keyser Soze future out of our current fears – environmental threats, collapsing economies, widening class divisions, loss of agency that affects everyone but the very rich.
My fellow Londoners will find that The Peripheral's future London ruled by a kleptocracy of Russian and Saudi oligarchs hits really close to home.
Also, The Peripheral feels destined to be adapted for the big screen by JJ Abrams — so many of his favourite tropes!
I would say that this is Gibson back on form. The start of the book can be construed as bewildering, but in my view it's just Gibson making the reader work a little. There are things in the book that remain unexplained - like, where and what are the stub servers - vague references to Chinese tech, and the ending, whilst ‘happy', is a little too unresolved in my opinion.
Gibson says this is a standalone novel, but I think there are more than enough storylines and characters for at least another.
This aging techno geek enjoyed it.
Unusual. Time travel, or at least influence over time in a continuum... In order to achieve what? That is a mystery, but what is well clear is that William Gibson has his finger quite firmly on the nerve of now. He does what he does best, and produces another very interesting novel.
A little disappointed. It took me a good quarter to a third of the book to really get into it, then about three quarters in I was back to slogging through it. Waiting for a plot, still. Some things happen, a lot of it seemingly improbable and off-stage. Until a climax that kind of jumps out from nowhere and leaves you wondering exactly what happened, what does it mean, and do I even care. Sadly, it's my least favorite Gibson book.
Wait. Take a moment to adjust your expectations.Are you a William Gibson fan already? Good. (If not, maybe you're about to be – but you'll just have to use your imagination for this next part.)Ponder, for a moment, how brilliant Gibson is, at his best. Imagine his most evocative writing, his most incisive predictions for the future, his most believable characters, his most information-dense world-building. Remember the way it felt to read [b:Neuromancer 22328 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) William Gibson https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1167348726s/22328.jpg 909457] for the first time. Try to imagine Gibson writing a book as prescient as that, in 2014.You can expect this book to be that good and you won't be let down. In fact, it will probably still blow your mind.
I can never explain why I love him. I'm not into tech, and I don't really get tech in real life. But I love William Gibson anyway. I find his tech fascinating, believable, and I usually get into his characters. I especially adored the characters in this book. This is a terrible review, but oh well. I'm full of post-Thanksgiving cheer and don't care.
Executive Summary: A good, but not great techno-thriller of sorts. 3.5 Stars.Audio book: I really didn't like Lorelei King at the start. But she grew on me. I'm not sure if she got better as the book went on, or I just needed some distance from my previous book. She's clear and easy to hear. She did a few voices, but they weren't very memorable to me.I will say I started off pretty confused. I'm not sure if that would have been solved with some rereading of the early chapters, or if I just needed to get my bearings. Once I did though, I found it easier to follow. Audio is probably not the best choice though if you often distracted when doing audio books.Full ReviewWilliam Gibson is one of those authors I keep meaning to read more of. I'm ashamed to say I've only read [b:Neuromancer 22328 Neuromancer (Sprawl, #1) William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1285017005s/22328.jpg 909457], [b:Count Zero 22200 Count Zero (Sprawl, #2) William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1390358225s/22200.jpg 879764], and [b:Burning Chrome 22323 Burning Chrome William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1349075772s/22323.jpg 2457086]. I've had [b:Mona Lisa Overdrive 154091 Mona Lisa Overdrive (Sprawl, #3) William Gibson https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1374778887s/154091.jpg 1263322] sitting unread on my shelves for a few years now.So I can't say how this really stacks up against his other works too well. It reminds me more of [a:Daniel Suarez 1956402 Daniel Suarez https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1265394868p2/1956402.jpg] than the stuff of his I have read. If nothing else this book renews my desire to read some more of his work.This one is hard to categorize. I'd guess techo-thriller is maybe the best? It's also a time travel book. Sort of. The time stuff definitely falls into the Back to the Future 2 category (altering the past forks it to a new future).I think both protagonists are pretty good, though Flynne is easily the better of the two. She keeps herself together way better than I would under the circumstances she faces. Netherton is much less interesting, and took me a bit to warm up to, but by the end, I enjoyed his chapters almost as much as Flynne's. Though that may simply be due to the amount of overlap of the two.The world building could have been a little better. There is this mysterious Jackpot, that while explained eventually, wasn't really explained in a lot of detail. I guess it was to move the plot along more than anything. We get glimpses of both Flynne's and Netherton's worlds, though not as much as I'd have liked.There is a bunch of technology in this one. Some of it looks familiar like tablets and drones. The rest of it sounds familiar like robots, advanced haptic controls, and embedded phones. There is no big dreaming here. Everything Mr. Gibson writes seems feasible, and some of it probably not too far off.At it's core though, this is really just a thriller. There are shady characters and a mysterious murder drives the plot. I probably would have preferred something more cyberpunk, but I have no idea if still writes those kinds of books anymore.I found it a quick listen, at just over fourteen hours I did most of it over a busy weekend of chores and bike riding. Not a bad choice if you're looking for something shorter to fit in between other reads like I was.