The Peripheral

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