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The Peripheral (The Jackpot Trilogy Book 1) Kindle Edition
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Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go.
Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby.
Burton’s been moonlighting online, secretly working security in some game prototype, a virtual world that looks vaguely like London, but a lot weirder. He’s got Flynne taking over shifts, promised her the game’s not a shooter. Still, the crime she witnesses there is plenty bad.
Flynne and Wilf are about to meet one another. Her world will be altered utterly, irrevocably, and Wilf’s, for all its decadence and power, will learn that some of these third-world types from the past can be badass.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherBerkley
- Publication dateOctober 28, 2014
- File size1630 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
Praise for The Peripheral
“Spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer and all the maturity and sly wit of Spook Country. It’s brilliant.”—Cory Doctorow
“From page one, The Peripheral ticks and sings with the same controlled, dark energy and effortless grace of language....Like the best of Gibson’s early, groundbreaking work, it offers up the same kind of chewy, tactile future that you can taste and smell and feel on your skin; that you believe, immediately, like some impossible documentary, because the thing that Gibson has always been best at is offering up futures haunted by the past.”—NPR
“[Gibson is] revered not just as a unique and brilliantly talented SF novelist but a social and psychological visionary....[The Peripheral] creates a future that is astoundingly inventive and frighteningly plausible....A wonderful addition to a brilliant oeuvre.”—The Sunday Times (UK)
“Gibson's characters are intensely real, and Flynne is a clever, compelling, stereotype-defying, unhesitating protagonist who makes this novel a standout.”—Publishers Weekly
“The Peripheral is one of [Gibson's] most sophisticated attention-management machines, a culmination of his career, both a return to old themes and a step forward, and his most sustained experiment in helping us, even if only for a moment, see the world with new eyes.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“No one writes better about the near future than Gibson.”—The Washington Post
“Like any really well-designed thrill ride of mystery tour (or sonnet or string quartet), as soon as you get off, you want to get right on for another go-round.”—Locus
More Praise for William Gibson
“His eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen.”—The New Yorker
“Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.”—Details
“William Gibson can craft sentences of uncanny beauty, and he is a great poet of crowds.”—San Francisco Chronicle Book Review
“Gibson’s radar is deftly tuned to the changes in the culture that many of us are missing.”—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Peripheral
By William Gibson
1.
The Haptics
They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad-ass dance, which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.
Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that foam, packed down hard in the dark earth. He had the trailer’s lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics off, like the skin was dusted with something dead-fish silver. They said they could get that off too, but he didn’t want to keep going back.
“Hey, Burton,” she called.
“Easy Ice,” he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the door open, the other tugging a new white t-shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.
Inside, the trailer was the color of Vaseline, LEDs buried in it, bedded in Hefty Mart amber. She’d helped him sweep it out, before he moved in. He hadn’t bothered to bring the shop vac down from the garage, just bombed the inside a good inch thick with this Chinese polymer, dried glassy and flexible. You could see stubs of burnt matches down inside that, or the cork-patterned paper on the squashed filter of a legally sold cigarette, older than she was. She knew where to find a rusty jeweler’s screwdriver, and somewhere else a 2009 quarter.
Now he just got his stuff out before he hosed the inside, every week or two, like washing out Tupperware. Leon said the polymer was curatorial, how you could peel it all out before you put your American classic up on eBay. Let it take the dirt with it.
Burton took her hand, squeezed, pulling her up and in.
“You going to Davisville?” she asked.
“Leon’s picking me up.”
“Luke 4:5’s protesting there. Shaylene said.”
He shrugged, moving a lot of muscle but not by much.
“That was you, Burton. Last month. On the news. That funeral, in Carolina.”
He didn’t quite smile.
“You might’ve killed that boy.”
He shook his head, just a fraction, eyes narrowed.
“Scares me, you do that shit.”
“You still walking point, for that lawyer in Tulsa?”
“He isn’t playing. Busy lawyering, I guess.”
“You’re the best he had. Showed him that.”
“Just a game.” Telling herself, more than him.
“Might as well been getting himself a Marine.”
She thought she saw that thing the haptics did, then, that shiver, then gone.
“Need you to sub for me,” he said, like nothing had happened. “Five-hour shift. Fly a quadcopter.”
She looked past him to his display. Some Danish supermodel’s legs, retracting into some brand of car nobody she knew would ever drive, or likely even see on the road. “You’re on disability,” she said. “Aren’t supposed to work.”
He looked at her.
“Where’s the job?” she asked.
“No idea.”
“Outsourced? VA’ll catch you.”
“Game,” he said. “Beta of some game.”
“Shooter?”
“Nothing to shoot. Work a perimeter around three floors of this tower, fifty-fifth to fifty-seventh. See what turns up.”
“What does?”
“Paparazzi.” He showed her the length of his index finger. “Little things. You get in their way. Edge ’em back. That’s all you do.”
“When?”
“Tonight. Get you set up before Leon comes.”
“Supposed to help Shaylene, later.”
“Give you two fives.” He took his wallet from his jeans, edged out a pair of new bills, the little windows unscratched, holograms bright.
Folded, they went into the right front pocket of her cutoffs. “Turn the lights down,” she said, “hurts my eyes.”
He did, swinging his hand through the display, but then the place looked like a seventeen-year-old boy’s bedroom. She reached over, flicked it up a little.
She sat in his chair. It was Chinese, reconfiguring to her height and weight as he pulled himself up an old metal stool, almost no paint left on it, waving a screen into view.
MILAGROS COLDIRON SA
“What’s that?” she asked.
“Who we’re working for.”
“How do they pay you?”
“Hefty Pal.”
“You’ll get caught for sure.”
“Goes to an account of Leon’s,” he said. Leon’s Army service had been about the same time as Burton’s in the Marines, but Leon wasn’t due any disability. Wasn’t, their mother said, like he could claim to have caught the dumbfuck there. Not that Flynne had ever thought Leon was anything but sly, under it all, and lazy. “Need my log-in and the password. Hat trick.” How they both pronounced his tag, HaptRec, to keep it private. He took an envelope from his back pocket, unfolded and opened it. The paper looked thick, creamy.
“That from Fab?”
He drew out a long slip of the same paper, printed with what looked to be a full paragraph of characters and symbols. “You scan it, or type it outside that window, we’re out a job.”
She picked up the envelope, from where it lay on what she guessed had been a fold-down dining table. It was one of Shaylene’s top-shelf stationery items, kept literally on a top shelf. When letter orders came in from big companies, or lawyers, you went up there. She ran her thumb across the logo in the upper left corner. “Medellín?”
“Security firm.”
“You said it’s a game.”
“That’s ten thousand dollars, in your pocket.”
“How long you been doing this?”
“Two weeks now. Sundays off.”
“How much you get?”
“Twenty-five thousand per.”
“Make it twenty, then. Short notice and I’m stiffing Shaylene.”
He gave her another two fives.
2.
Death Cookie
Netherton woke to Rainey’s sigil, pulsing behind his lids at the rate of a resting heartbeat. He opened his eyes. Knowing better than to move his head, he confirmed that he was in bed, alone. Both positive, under current circumstances. Slowly, he lifted his head from the pillow, until he could see that his clothes weren’t where he assumed he would have dropped them. Cleaners, he knew, would have come from their nest beneath the bed, to drag them away, flense them of whatever invisible quanta of sebum, skin-flakes, atmospheric particulates, food residue, other.
“Soiled,” he pronounced, thickly, having briefly imagined such cleaners for the psyche, and let his head fall back.
Rainey’s sigil began to strobe, demandingly.
He sat up cautiously. Standing would be the real test. “Yes?”
Strobing ceased. “Un petit problème,” Rainey said.
He closed his eyes, but then there was only her sigil. He opened them.
“She’s your fucking problem, Wilf.”
He winced, the amount of pain this caused startling him. “Have you always had this puritanical streak? I hadn’t noticed.”
“You’re a publicist,” she said. “She’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.”
His eyes, a size too large for their sockets, felt gritty. “She must be nearing the patch,” he said, reflexively attempting to suggest that he was alert, in control, as opposed to disastrously and quite expectedly hungover.
“They’re almost above it now,” she said. “With your problem.”
“What’s she done?”
“One of her stylists,” she said, “is also, evidently, a tattooist.”
Again, the sigil dominated his private pain-filled dark. “She didn’t,” he said, opening his eyes. “She did?”
“She did.”
"We had an extremely specific verbal on that.”
“Fix it,” she said. “Now. The world’s watching, Wilf. As much of it as we’ve been able to scrape together, anyway. Will Daedra West make peace with the patchers, they wonder? Should they decide to back our project, they ask? We want yes, and yes.”
“They ate the last two envoys,” he said. “Hallucinating in synch with a forest of code, convinced their visitors were shamanic spirit beasts. I spent three entire days, last month, having her briefed at the Connaught. Two anthropologists, three neoprimitivist curators. No tattoos. A brand-new, perfectly blank epidermis. Now this.”
“Talk her out of it, Wilf.”
He stood, experimentally. Hobbled, naked, into the bathroom. Urinated as loudly as possible. “Out of what, exactly?”
“Parafoiling in—”
“That’s been the plan—”
“In nothing but her new tattoos.”
“Seriously? No.”
“Seriously,” she said.
“Their aesthetic, if you haven’t noticed, is about benign skin cancers, supernumerary nipples. Conventional tattoos belong firmly among the iconics of the hegemon. It’s like wearing your cock ring to meet the pope, and making sure he sees it. Actually, it’s worse than that. What are they like?”
“Posthuman filth, according to you.”
“The tattoos!”
“Something to do with the Gyre,” she said. “Abstract.”
“Cultural appropriation. Lovely. Couldn’t be worse. On her face? Neck?”
“No, fortunately. If you can talk her into the jumpsuit we’re printing on the moby, we may still have a project.”
He looked at the ceiling. Imagined it opening. Himself ascending. Into he knew not what.
“Then there’s the matter of our Saudi backing,” she said, “which is considerable. Visible tattoos would be a stretch, there. Nudity’s nonnegotiable.”
“They might take it as a signal of sexual availability,” he said, having done so himself.
“The Saudis?”
“The patchers.”
“They might take it as her offer to be lunch,” she said. “Their last, either way. She’s a death cookie, Wilf, for the next week or so. Anyone so much as steals a kiss goes into anaphylactic shock. Something with her thumbnails, too, but we’re less clear about that.”
He wrapped his waist in a thick white towel. Considered the carafe of water on the marble countertop. His stomach spasmed.
“Lorenzo,” she said, as an unfamiliar sigil appeared, “Wilf Netherton has your feed, in London.”
He almost vomited, then, at the sudden input: bright saline light above the Garbage Patch, the sense of forward motion.
3.
Pushing Bugs
She managed to get off the phone with Shaylene without mentioning Burton. Shaylene had gone out with him a few times in high school, but she’d gotten more interested when he’d come back from the Marines, with that chest and the stories around town about Haptic Recon 1. Flynne figured Shaylene was basically doing what the relationship shows called romanticizing pathology. Not that there was a whole lot better available locally.
She and Shaylene both worried about Burton getting in trouble over Luke 4:5, but that was about all they agreed on, when it came to him. Nobody liked Luke 4:5, but Burton had a bad thing about them. She had a feeling they were just convenient, but it still scared her. They’d started out as a church, or in a church, not liking anyone being gay or getting abortions or using birth control. Protesting military funerals, which was a thing. Basically they were just assholes, though, and took it as the measure of God’s satisfaction with them that everybody else thought they were assholes. For Burton, they were a way around whatever kept him in line the rest of the time.
She leaned forward now, to squint under the table for the black nylon case he kept his tomahawk in. Wouldn’t want him going up to Davisville with that. He called it an axe, not a tomahawk, but an axe was something you chopped wood with. She reached under, hooked it out, relieved to feel the weight. Didn’t need to open it, but she did. Case was widest at the top, allowing for the part you’d have chopped wood with. More like the blade of a chisel, but hawk-billed. Where the back of an axe would’ve been flat, like the face of a hammer, it was spiked, like a miniature of the blade but curved the other way. Either one thick as your little finger, but ground to edges you wouldn’t feel as you cut yourself. Handle was graceful, a little recurved, the wood soaked in something that made it tougher, springy. The maker had a forge in Tennessee, and everyone in Haptic Recon 1 got one. It looked used. Careful of her fingers, she closed the case and put it back under the table.
She swung her phone through the display, checking Badger’s map of the county. Shaylene’s badge was in Forever Fab, an anxious segment of purple in its emo ring. Nobody looked to be up to much, which wasn’t exactly a surprise. Madison and Janice were gaming, Sukhoi Flankers, vintage flight sims being Madison’s main earner. They both had their rings beige, for bored shitless, but then they always had them that way. Made four people she knew working tonight, counting her.
She bent her phone the way she liked it for gaming, thumbed HaptRec into the log-in window, entered the long-ass password. Flicked go. Nothing happened. Then the whole display popped, like the flash of a camera in an old movie, silvered like the marks of the haptics. She blinked.
And then she was rising, out of what Burton said would be a launch bay in the roof of a van. Like she was in an elevator. No control yet. And all around her, and he hadn’t told her this, were whispers, urgent as they were faint, like a cloud of invisible fairy police dispatchers.
And this other evening light, rainy, rose and silver, and to her left a river the color of cold lead. Dark tumble of city, towers in the distance, few lights.
Camera down giving her the white rectangle of the van, shrinking in the street below. Camera up, the building towered away forever, a cliff the size of the world.
Product details
- ASIN : B00INIXKV2
- Publisher : Berkley (October 28, 2014)
- Publication date : October 28, 2014
- Language : English
- File size : 1630 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 498 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #33,000 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
William Gibson is the award-winning author of Neuromancer, Mona Lisa Overdrive, The Difference Engine, with Bruce Sterling, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition. William Gibson lives in Vancouver, Canada. His latest novel, published by Penguin, is Spook Country (2007).
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Top reviews from the United States
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I swore I was never going to like cyberpunk. I read Gibson's COUNT ZERO and VIRUAL LIGHT. I read Stephenson's THE DIAMOND AGE. I decided I didn't like the style OR the subject matter. Heck, I even tried to read THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, by both Sterling and Gibson, and I decided that steampunk (yes, that was steampunk, but no one seems to credit it that way these days, at least not that I hear) was a waste of my time too.
That was 30 years ago. Times change. People change. Writers change. Genres change. I don't mind reading steampunk these days - I feel that some of it is really pretty good. I absolutely loved ANATHEM by Neal Stephenson, although I generally don't read his books because they are monstrous doorstops that I don't have time for.
And I tried Gibson again.
THE PERIPHERAL was being talked about on podcasts, in blogs, and everywhere else that I pay attention to in the field. It was getting good reviews, and it was being hailed as "Gibson's return to undeniable science fiction". I was dubious of that last statement, as I didn't think anything else he wrote was science fiction, so how can he return to it?
But as I said, things change. And since this was the year I was going to get ahead of the game by reading novels that would assuredly be on the Hugo ballot, I figured I would give it a try (and as far as getting ahead of the game, well, we all know how THAT turned out).
And wouldn't you know, I liked it.
THE PERIPHERAL takes place in a not too distant future. Well, I should rephrase that. It takes place in two futures: one not too distant, and one a century or so further on. The near-ish future, in America, or some form of it, is a bit of a mess. There's the drug trade, an updated version of what the reader presumes is WalMart, and a very bleak economy. The further along future that we see is in London, after an event called The Jackpot had killed off a great portion of the world's population.
We begin in the near future. Flynne lives with her brother Burton and her mother. Burton is a military veteran who suffers from trauma he suffered while serving in the U.S. Military. He is getting aid from the U.S. government because he's not supposed to be able to work. He has, however, found a job beta testing some video game software for a Colombian outfit called Coldiron. One day he goes off to be part of a protest group against a religious organization, and asks Flynne to cover for him on the job for a few days. His job in the game is that of security. He tells Flynne to keep an eye on a particular tower and fend off little nano-paparazzi type devices. However, on the second day of the job she witnesses a murder, and something doesn't seem quite right to her about it. And off we go into the story.
THE PERIPHERAL is a murder mystery, pure and simple. Well, maybe not so pure and simple, since we *are* talking a) science fiction, and b) science fiction by William Gibson. It's probably not too much of a spoiler to say that the murder was in the future, a future life is also stark and bleak - never mind just a bit weird - due to The Jackpot. One of the devices that the future has is some sort of mysterious server, built by the Chinese (but never really visited in detail or explained at all in the book) that allows residents of that future to travel back and interact with various different pasts, which may or may not be their own past (It really is all a bit wonky but kind of cool. I didn't let myself get too distracted by the lack of details or even the not quite understanding of how pasts and that particular future relate. It was better that way.), call "stubs". People who do that are called "continua enthusiasts", and while in the novel we don't much deal with them, the people we deal with do have to go back to the past to try and figure out what they can about the murder that took place.
I'll tell you what - this is a really cool story with some really neat concepts. While the idea of telling a story that takes place in two separate times is not new, the way of the two timelines interacting with each other is new - at least to me. Yeah, it's a bit of "hand-wavium", but hand-wavium is a time honored tradition in our field, and it is acceptable some times and not in others. I think it works well here. The future is populated with a bunch
of interesting - at least to me - characters, including an investigator, Lowbeer, who reminds me a lot of Paula Myo from Peter F. Hamilton's novels.
The novel is not without its faults, minor though they be. The first 100 pages or so (yes, I looked while I was listening to the audiobook) were a bit of a slog to get through. Gibson introduces new terminology that makes readers scratch their heads for awhile until they figure out just what it is he is talking about (although it could be argued that a science fiction reader, especially one who reads Gibson, should not only be used to it by now, but shouldn't need anything spelled out for them anyway), and it does take awhile to figure out that Gibson is switching back and forth between two timelines. However, once all that stuff is squared away and the reader figures out the basics, the story moves along at a pretty good pace, and is a good read. The conclusion was, for me, satisfying. Gibson wraps everything up fairly nicely with a little bow, which is something many writers don't do these days (although it can be argued that this is a standalone novel - for which I am grateful - and he darn well should tie things up nicely).
As far as the narration goes, well, I didn't think anyone was going to top R.C. Bray, the narrator of THE MARTIAN. I was wrong. Lorelei King was magnificent. She handled the voices of the different characters terrifically, in my opinion. The pacing was terrific, and I loved the accent. She didn't intrude upon the story; rather, she enhanced it from the very beginning. I would hope I run across her in other audiobooks I listen to in the future.
NEUROMANCER was one of those novels that comes along once a generation that changes the face of the field of science fiction, at least that's what I'm told. I will have to go back and read it, 30+ years after the fact. THE PERIPHERAL is not that kind of novel, but it doesn't have to be. It just is what it is - a terrific book.
Top reviews from other countries
La lettura in lingua originale dà più sapore alla storia.
Raccomandatissimo!
J'ai pris ce livre suite à la série TV et ne le regrette pas : il est aussi bon que la série et différent
Goodyear stuff comme disent les Anglais
If you're new to Gibson's books, then whoa, you're in for a ride. He's quite hardcore punk sci-fi and unapologetically doesn't explain things to the reader - you'll eventually pick things up by nuance. Or not.
If you've chosen to read this book because of the tv show, then you should know that the book is about 75% completely different from the show (at least up to episode 6). While the show is mostly about Flynne, her brother, Netherton and Nuland, the book's main heroes are Lowbeer (who's not even in the show until episode 6), Conner, Flynne, Netherton and to some extent Macon.
So, it's best to treat the tv show and the book as two separate entities who just happen to share a few characters and some events in the same locations. There's no point comparing them because they're both good, just in different ways.
So, is the book any good? If, like me, you're a Gibson fan, then yes, it's absolutely brilliant. He drops the reader into worlds, ideas, concepts and morals that are fresh and so perfectly described but barely explained, that it really feels as though you're exploring it alongside Flynne and Conner. If you dislike ambiguity, then it could be a bit frustrating.
I'm having a hard time understanding the motivations for all the characters (unlike the tv show where some of them are just power-hungry and bad); and occasionally the internal logic doesn't make sense: how is Wilf an alcoholic in a world where all medical problems are fixed instantly by a Medici device? How exactly are the people in the future able to connect to the past? A 'secret Chinese server' is right up there with 'Somehow he came back' when it comes to plastering over gaping plotholes.
Overall it's a great read; mind bending and creative. It works well as a companion-piece to the tv series as well.
Seems like it was used or on display.
Reviewed in Singapore on April 17, 2024
Seems like it was used or on display.