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A review by sarahetc
The Peripheral by William Gibson
5.0
You have your consciousness. You have your flesh. You have the whole of human history behind you. And you just found out that your future is not the only future. And your past hasn't been the past since sometime last week. Except it still is for you, but not for others. Meanwhile, life is tough, jobs are few and if you can make some cash on a video-game playing side gig why not? It's just gaming, right?
So thinks Flynne when she agrees to moonlight for her brother Burton, who has other, illegaler things to do of a Thursday evening. Flynne logs in, EASYICE, and plays. She continues to play in different sessions, helping Burton keep his VA and disability wages, since he got back from the war with his haptics all janky. But then she sees one of the NPCs murdered. It was just an NPC, right? RIGHT?!
Turns out, wrong. That was a real woman in a real city called London, only not the London Flynne knows. The London of a hundred some years in the future. Well, a different future to be sure, so maybe not the future but a future. A future created by a time travel server hobbyist with nothing better to do. Ta very much for setting up the shadow corporation with all the crazy money. Except we need more money, stuff, people, and guns because the people that killed that woman have also found this stub of history and Flynne, Burton, their friends Connor, Macon, Edward, Leon and Shaylene and even more are now under the gun. Just transferring Flynne's and Burton's and Connor's consciousnesses to the Other Future into synthetic peripheral bodies is not going to help! Right?
This was a tremendously interesting, entertaining novel. The idea that consciousness and flesh can be separated by both time and space given technology is incredibly tantalizing. Gibson's style is, as usual, spare, but that detracts not at all from the intense complexity of the plotting in different (and differently) concurrent presents, futures, and pasts. The characterization is also nigh on bravura with each of the many characters (and in some cases their alternate past/future iterations) wholly and completely drawn.
It's the kind of book that makes you want to know more and know farther. And also see it as a movie. And maybe write some fanfiction? And talk about it with everyone you know. Right!
So thinks Flynne when she agrees to moonlight for her brother Burton, who has other, illegaler things to do of a Thursday evening. Flynne logs in, EASYICE, and plays. She continues to play in different sessions, helping Burton keep his VA and disability wages, since he got back from the war with his haptics all janky. But then she sees one of the NPCs murdered. It was just an NPC, right? RIGHT?!
Turns out, wrong. That was a real woman in a real city called London, only not the London Flynne knows. The London of a hundred some years in the future. Well, a different future to be sure, so maybe not the future but a future. A future created by a time travel server hobbyist with nothing better to do. Ta very much for setting up the shadow corporation with all the crazy money. Except we need more money, stuff, people, and guns because the people that killed that woman have also found this stub of history and Flynne, Burton, their friends Connor, Macon, Edward, Leon and Shaylene and even more are now under the gun. Just transferring Flynne's and Burton's and Connor's consciousnesses to the Other Future into synthetic peripheral bodies is not going to help! Right?
This was a tremendously interesting, entertaining novel. The idea that consciousness and flesh can be separated by both time and space given technology is incredibly tantalizing. Gibson's style is, as usual, spare, but that detracts not at all from the intense complexity of the plotting in different (and differently) concurrent presents, futures, and pasts. The characterization is also nigh on bravura with each of the many characters (and in some cases their alternate past/future iterations) wholly and completely drawn.
It's the kind of book that makes you want to know more and know farther. And also see it as a movie. And maybe write some fanfiction? And talk about it with everyone you know. Right!