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mburnamfink 's review for:
The Peripheral
by William Gibson
I've read a William Gibson novel. Yes, this is definitely a novel by William Gibson, and it's about scifi stuff like time travel, alternate futures, telepresence, and exotic nanotech weapons, rather than viral social media videos or pants.
In a decaying rural America, perhaps a decade or from our from our own, Flynne takes care of her family, an ill mother and a brother occultly wounded while serving as a Marine in something called Haptic Recon. She's covering her borther's job, playing what she thinks is a strange video game, when she witnesses a woman die in skyscraper, killed by .
It's not game, it's a future. Not her future, but a world after a collapse and rebuilding called the jackpot, a world ruled by hidden forces, and a world that can make limited connections to pasts. Wilf Netherton works for one of these mysterious forces. He's an alcoholic public relationships representative, and his job is to manage the chaos in Flynne's timeline to enable her to identify the murderer before an opposing power gets her killed.
The book is composed of these little facets, average length 4 pages, alternating between Flynne and Netherton . And individual, these facets are glittering Gibsonesque miniatures, but when assembled I'm not sure they make a story. "Peripheral" refers to both a key technology of the novel, the telepresence biorobots Flynne uses to visit the future, and a distance from the center of events or influence. Both Netherton and Flynne dance at the strings of Lowbeer, a British cop/spy/spook of immense age and influence. But the agendas are so submerged that the events of the novel just happen, arbitrarily. I've no sense of what Netherton's world actually operates on, or why they care about Flynne. And while the tropes "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" and "contemporary America is a cyberpunk dystopia already" are already cliches, Gibson's version of America feels a lot like Snow Crash played straight, an already tired joke.
Come for the sentences, because there's not much under the surface.
In a decaying rural America, perhaps a decade or from our from our own, Flynne takes care of her family, an ill mother and a brother occultly wounded while serving as a Marine in something called Haptic Recon. She's covering her borther's job, playing what she thinks is a strange video game, when she witnesses a woman die in skyscraper, killed by .
It's not game, it's a future. Not her future, but a world after a collapse and rebuilding called the jackpot, a world ruled by hidden forces, and a world that can make limited connections to pasts. Wilf Netherton works for one of these mysterious forces. He's an alcoholic public relationships representative, and his job is to manage the chaos in Flynne's timeline to enable her to identify the murderer before an opposing power gets her killed.
The book is composed of these little facets, average length 4 pages, alternating between Flynne and Netherton . And individual, these facets are glittering Gibsonesque miniatures, but when assembled I'm not sure they make a story. "Peripheral" refers to both a key technology of the novel, the telepresence biorobots Flynne uses to visit the future, and a distance from the center of events or influence. Both Netherton and Flynne dance at the strings of Lowbeer, a British cop/spy/spook of immense age and influence. But the agendas are so submerged that the events of the novel just happen, arbitrarily. I've no sense of what Netherton's world actually operates on, or why they care about Flynne. And while the tropes "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" and "contemporary America is a cyberpunk dystopia already" are already cliches, Gibson's version of America feels a lot like Snow Crash played straight, an already tired joke.
Come for the sentences, because there's not much under the surface.