Stuart's Reviews > The Peripheral

Two Distopias, Gibson Style: Dazzling Ideas, But Readers Have to Do the Heavy Lifting
I haven't read any William Gibson since his Sprawl Trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) in the 1980s and The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Stirling) in 1990. Since then I've known about his Bridge Trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties) in the 1990s and Blue Ant Trilogy (Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History) in the 2000s, but while curious I didn't bite. From others I heard that he was focusing more on the social impact of technology and media on contemporary or near future society, and I wasn't in the mood for that at the time.

A voracious reader friend of mine said I really should give The Peripheral (2014) a try as it's both a near future dystopia in the 2030s set after a series of environmental disasters, wars, and overall deterioration in global societies and economies as an extension of existing trends, and a further future in the 2070s where very little is left of conventional societies, with only very wealthy enclaves and competing corporations, nanotechnology, and quantum tunneling that allows data communication with the past, creating new quantum continuums, named 'stubs" that can be exploited for profit etc.

Frankly, I've always found Gibson's books difficult to enjoy, both the characters and plot-lines, due to his lean, clinical, and cerebral writing style that only provides glimpses and sketches of a much larger, very complex world and storyline. He wants his readers to work to connect the dots on their own, think through the implications of new technologies and trends, and piece things together. It's very much the "throw them off the deep-end" technique, so really isn't suited to casual reading. His characters are often considered difficult to connect with, but I did think the main characters here, Flynn, Burton, Conner, Wilf, Cherise, and Lowbeer, are all well-developed and interesting.

The only problem is that I now only have the time & energy for audiobooks, and trying to keep track of events that was is a lot harder than print books. So it was only after I saw and enjoyed Amazon's drama series of The Peripheral that I decided to give this audiobook another chance. And the plot is still so complex that I had to read the Wiki entry to have any chance of keeping things straight. Is that the sign of a successful book when the reader needs a crib sheet and drama just to get a grip on it? Not sure, but the story and future extrapolation were certainly worthy of the drama treatment, even if many people will admit they could hardly understand what's happening~