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The Peripheral
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The Peripheral
Unavailable
The Peripheral
Audiobook14 hours

The Peripheral

Written by William Gibson

Narrated by Lorelei King

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

()

Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010's New York Times-bestselling 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 he's 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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 28, 2014
ISBN9781101619872
Unavailable
The Peripheral
Author

William Gibson

William Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is credited with having coined the term “cyberspace,” and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. His other novels include All Tomorrow’s Parties, Idoru, Virtual Light, Mona Lisa Overdrive, and Count Zero. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia with his wife and two children.

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Reviews for The Peripheral

Rating: 3.8862386385321104 out of 5 stars
4/5

545 ratings45 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Confusing but fun.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    the scenario is very original, and its gradual revelation to the reader impressively executed; but the writing is very passionless and opaque. I've never been a huge Gibson fan anyway, and this didn't change my mind.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love William Gibson. I love all of his work in every medium i have known about it. This was a great version.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Feels weird dissing a William Gibson book. But yeah.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Kept my interest. Probably longer and more obscure than necessary.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I enjoy Gibson's work. This one is no exception. Very interesting idea for handling time travel. Gibson is very light on the details as to how exactly people in future London tapped into America's past but that's just typical Gibson. Looking forward to reading Agency and Jackpot when he finally releases it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    An imaginative near future using mind transport and many futures theories to tell the story of the world getting complex, tired, and technologically advanced at the same time. I liked the short chapters bouncing back and forth from present to future. It was different enough from the TV show which I was glad I watched because I may not have been able to follow the story. Ending was ok but it seemed rushed.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    An astonishingly plausible look at a future that seems inevitable, and another future that seems undreamable. Gibson's prose is tight, at times claustrophobically so, but it evokes so powerfully that even the most outlandish events take on a realism that most writers struggle for in the most mundane descriptions.

    There is much here beyond the story. It deserves rereading, and examining, and enjoying.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I found the story jumped around so much I had a hard time getting into it. The premise of video games creating alternate time universes populated partly by robotic representatives of the players back in the originating universe is clever but for me hard to follow as an audio book.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Peripheral is a good word for it. You get a sort of peripheral understanding of what's going on. It's like you learned high school French, and someone is giving a speech in French. You get an understanding from some of the words that you know, but it's not adding up to total comprehension. Which was OK when I was younger and reading 'Neuromancer'. But I'm unable to discern a point to this one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Nobody writes like William Gibson.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Feels weird dissing a William Gibson book. But yeah.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A interesting and intriguing beginning leads on to an unpredictable thriller with interesting characters and situations. This is advanced science fiction and dimensional travel with little in the way of explanation so be prepared for some puzzling times ahead. The initial effort that you put in is well rewarded though, so it’s worth staying with it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I’m a big fan of WG. His latest works were some of his best writing but had less SF than a lot of his previous iterations. In this piece, the writing is still great, but the choppy editing and awkward characterization early on made it extremely hard to follow.

    After the thing gets rolling it makes more sense and I was able to catch up. Once I became familiar with the characters and what Gibson was doing with alternate timelines and pseudo-time-travel it was a lot more enjoyable. Great metaphor and description, and his ideas are, as always, very interesting.

    The ending was kind of flat. Big build up and then it just kind of peters out. Gibson has said before that he likes to read stories where he has to figure out what is going on, and this certainly fits that brand. He never tells you how this remote presence thing works, but it avoids a lot of boring details that way as well. I recommend to any Gibson fan.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    one of his best. And more prescient than I want it to be.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    4.5 stars. Definitely really enjoyed this. Quite dense in the beginning, I think I had to re-read the first 10 pages (or so) at least 3 times. It was fun wrapping my head around what was actually happening , and once I got a sense of that, the story took over in a very compelling way.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Burton, an ex veteran who suffers from neural damage is beta testing new game. One night he can’t so he asks his sister Flynne to help. Set in the very near future, this is a dystopian world where people are existing but not thriving, living on the fringes of the economy with short term jobs, that whilst they might not be illegal are firmly located in the grey zone. Flynne dislikes games, but the money is good. It seems fairly simple and innocuous, keep little robot bugs from getting too close to a particular building. Whilst in the game she sees something that she wasn’t expecting, was it part of the game, or is something more sinister going on.

    It turns out this game is streaming data from the future via a server in China, and Flynne is the primary witness of a murder that happens 70 years from now. In this very alternative future London is Will Netherton, who is a publicist. His career is almost a car crash, but he has a unique quality that is keeping his head above water; he is popular. Flynne starts to interact with this future by being streamed from her present into an organic cyborb called a Peripheral, but because of what she has seen she becomes a crucial element in the power struggle and the future of her world and the world to come.

    Gibson has written an incredibly complicated and at times baffling plot, and that does detract a little from the book. But what he has done here is to take a projected future of grim, short term economic reality, where the technologies that we see around us are pervasive, and slammed that together with a very different future of high technology and a place where only the very rich have survived, and the technology is out of this world. As with all of his books, he manages to make all of this tech just work seamlessly as well as having humans that defy description.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm rating this three stars for personal enjoyment, not literary prowess or world-building imagination because I'm sure William Gibson supplied both, but I just found the whole thing a bit of a slog to get through. I borrowed the sequel novel, Agency, from the library and was told that I would need to read The Peripheral first, so I did, starting what feels like a decade ago! I have read Gibson before but I can't remember the plotting being so dense! For the first 30% (on Kindle), I had absolutely no idea what was going on, just a growing cast of characters and a lot of technobabble. Then I found a glossary online, which helped, and I thought I might have cracked the code, but by the final chapters, consisting of long, never-ending paragraphs, I lost not only the plot but the will to live and started skimming. Some absolutely incredible futuristic inventions and fashions, and a depressing worldview that could well come true, but getting through both timelines was a chore for me. Here's hoping Agency is better!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    (Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)Although I was a huge fan of "cyberpunk" author William Gibson when younger, I must admit that I haven't read anything by him since 1996's Idoru, mostly because the four novels he's written since then have all been contemporary thrillers with little science-fiction in them, which is simply something I'm not really that interested in; so when I heard that his newest novel, last winter's The Peripheral, was a return for him to his sci-fi roots, I was excited to pick it up, and now that I have I can confidently state that I was not disappointed at all. More Virtual Light than Neuromancer, the dual storylines take place a mere 30 years in the future and 70 years after that, making great use of current cutting-edge subjects to deliver what on the one hand is a fascinating day-after-tomorrow story about an America in deep decline; but that's part of the fascinating nature of this book, that in the world of The Peripheral, a series of cataclysmic events happen soon after the storyline half that's set 30 years from now, in which the vast majority of human race dies even while the remaining few succeed in the kind of advanced science indistinguishable from magic, making the part set 100 years from now seem like far-future sci-fi, not only to us but to the hard-partying redneck military veterans we follow in the first storyline.It's this commingling of time periods that's at the heart of this book's fascinating plot; essentially, through a development that is barely understood, the 100-year-future characters of Post-Apocalypse London figure out a way to contact and communicate with our blue-collar heroes from the 30-year-future America, even while the quantum disruption ensures that the two worlds now exist as two different alternative timelines, neatly eliminating the tricky subject of whether actions in the "past" will affect those characters currently living in the "future;" and while this is first done just as a lark by bored rich celebrities who like saying that they have a literal ghost from the past virtually acting as one of their bodyguards, soon the intrusion into each other's timelines becomes an unstoppable mess that threatens to destroy both versions of Earth. Featuring Gibson's trademarked blend of mind-blowing concepts introduced with no explanation whatsoever, his habit of humanizing high tech into the dirty, scruffy world we all actually live in, and with great metaphorical digs not only of the Tea Party but also the kinds of hipsters who obsessively collect vinyl in an age of MP3s, this is nonetheless perhaps the most accessible science-fiction novel Gibson has ever written, with a storyline that was surprisingly easy to follow despite the time-traveling nature of it all, benefiting greatly from the "Justified meets The Matrix" paradigm of its 30-year-future half. Strongly recommended, but as always to just sci-fi fans only; if you're not already a fan of the genre, this will likely make you roll your eyes every few pages.Out of 10: 8.9, or 9.4 for sci-fi fans
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good workmanlike Gibson, reminiscent of his novels from the '80s/90s but obsessed with drones and 3D printing rather than virtual reality and space colonies. Showing, i guess, that SF is about the present, not, as commonly stated, the future. A fun read, if you accept the time-travel-via-Skype premise. All except for the revoltingly saccharine ending.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Years since I read "Necromancer" and Gibson is still as good as ever. And as weird. And as challenging. I like a novel that expects something of the reader. It's like real life. The back story isn't laid out for you. You need to pick it up as you go along. And, mostly you will. And for the bits you don't pick up? Well, perhaps it doesn't matter because the whole thing is a stream of twisted reality that just washes over you. Very satisfying.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Two stories are intertwined amazingly well.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There were many interesting concepts here, but the book was really confusing and I never did understand a lot of what happened, so I didn't enjoy this very much.In the not-too-distant future, the Chinese have somehow figured out a way to interact with the past (even the main characters don't know how this is possible). Interacting with the past creates a different timeline, known as a stub. The Peripheral follows two interacting timelines. One is a very near-future timeline, set in poor rural America, where a damaged war vet and his sister think they are playing a video game, when in reality, they are operating drones in a more distant future. In the distant future timeline, a woman has been murdered, and the people who created the stub are trying to figure out who murdered her.Even the plot summary is confusing. I'm not one to shy away from dense or confusing sci-fi, and I can usually piece it together and make sense of it all, but many elements of this book never made sense to me. Everything seemed very contrived. I never understood why two factions from the future were fighting over what happened in the stub. I never understood almost everything about Lowbeer and her motivations. It seems like the whole book could have ended about 40 pages in if they had just asked Flynne to describe the murderer. And if Flynne needed to ID the murderer, why did that require so many days of visits to the future?On top of that, I didn't find the characters to be at all interesting. Most of them were downright unlikeable, but even the best of them were flat and under-developed. All in all, despite some interesting concepts, this was a major disappointment.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I've skipped Gibson's more recent books and can't judge his output since 1999's All Tomorrow's Parties and the end of the Bridge trilogy. Having confessed that gap in my knowledge, he's either developed greatly since ATP or this is simply one of the best books he's written overall. Honestly, this is my favourite novel from him outside his earliest SF, meaning the genre-defining Burning Chrome and Neuromancer.It's just a tight, driven novel, in a way that Gibson's older stuff most often wasn't. It hooks from the get-go and keeps going pretty much all the way through. Admittedly the ending feels slightly anti-climatic, like there should have been something more dramatic to occur, but everything else was decent. Time travel is dealt with in a reasonable way and though the future presented is not as visionary as Gibson's early cyberpunk stories, it still convinces.I assume there will be further stories set in this universe and look forward to them. In the mean time, I should probably check out those Gibson novels I've skipped.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A nice story in the spirit of William Gibson's earlier novels; the style is a mixture between Gibson's cyberpunk novels and his newer books. This is the first "time travel" story I read where I was happy with how the author avoided problems caused by time travel paradoxa.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this book. It went down easy and fast, like a real chocolate milkshake.

    Gibson's two futures (three?) are well-described, if a little thin for my taste. With a lot of pages here, I would have enjoyed a bit more depth into the later future of Netherton and Lev. I'd especially have been interested in learning more about the kleptocracy, and what Lowbeer's role truly is there. And what the hell was The Remembrancer, anyway? That one went over my head.

    But I really enjoyed the entire idea, and the characters were fairly interesting, if again a little thinner than I'd have preferred. I like time-travel stories more than I should, and this take on the genre was somewhat novel.

    From early on in the book, it unfolded like a blockbuster movie, to the point where I was casting in my head as I was reading. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the ending truly went over the top in a "happy movie ending" sort of way. I'll admit there is a sappy part of me that liked how all these emotionally broken characters get to have wonderful love and partners in the end... but it really yanked me out of the book, and at that point I was trying to decide which crappy song by which crappy bubblegum pop star would be playing over the ending and the credits.

    3.5 stars, not 4.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Gibson's Neuromancer reformed SF when it was published, and I can still remember the feeling I had reading it. This won't do the same, but is still a very good story.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The opening drone security scenario is spectacular and amazing and really one of the greatest Gibson things ever, but unfortunately the author decided to build a generally mediocre novel around it. Cheesy dialogue and flat characters (aside from Flynne) ruin what could have been a pretty good story. Forget about the concept of "plot" of course. Don't get it confused: This novel, like other Gibson novels, is basically a a series of scenes that are mostly cliches with many unsympathetic characters that all basically sound the same. Don't get me wrong, though. I liked it a lot until 2/3s the way through.Not one of his best by a long stretch.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not blown away, the extra short chapters made it feel bitty to me. Interesting ideas and speckled with nice turns of phrase as usual, but a little below par for me in terms of characters and story
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This story of good versus evil is set in a near future and 70 years hence, and the characters are able to have a presence in both time frames through technology. Because of occurrences in both times, the future is changed, resulting in differing continua, but corporate and political greed seem to dominate in both settings and the main characters are embroiled in plots to prevent the worst from happening. Gibson makes readers work to understand the situation, and terminology and relationships seem to be explained well after they are introduced, leading to confusion followed by Aha! moments for the persistent reader.