THE PERIPHERAL
By William Gibson. Viking. $29.99.
William Gibson burst onto the fictional scene with his first novel Neuromancer in 1984, which kickstarted the cyberpunk genre. Gibson once said, that cyberspace was a "consensual hallucination". What is real and what is not real percolates The Peripheral's two futures.
The first is a 2030's "sadass" dystopian world where the gap between rich and poor is extreme. Flynne and her ex-Marine brother are US trailer park tenants eking out marginalised existences. In one sense, they are the peripherals in a rundown society.
Flynne works for the local 3-D printshop and is an unwitting gamer for "continua enthusiasts" from a future 70 years hence. This future world, on the other side of a singularity described as "the jackpot", has seen 80 per cent of the world's population die from cataclysmic climate change, economic chaos and global pandemics.
This affluent, technologically advanced, depopulated world, seen through the prism of an almost virtual London, is largely run by "klepts", the equivalents of contemporary Russian oligarchs. Gibson has said in an interview that the current influx of overseas money into London has "warped the fabric of the city" and he extrapolates accordingly.
When Flynne takes on her brother's role as an operator of anti-paparazzi drones and witnesses a "nanotech chainsaw" murder, the two worlds become directly linked. Wilf Netherton, a disgraced high-powered publicist in the world of 2100, facilitates Flynne's use of a "peripheral," an artificial body-cum-telepresence receiver, ensuring they become intertwined in the consequences of the murder.
This plotline only constitutes the barebones of a dense Gibson novel packed with imaginative technological inventions and societal extrapolations, not least on capitalism, government surveillance and retro Third World colonialism. Don't worry about the ultimate lack of narrative cohesion, just be swept away by Gibson's "brain splode" ideas and quantum "stub" interactions.
Colin Steele is a Canberra reviewer.
