In 1984, William Gibson published Neuromancer, the novel that introduced the world to the concept of cyberpunk and with it anticipated the information age. Given the technological advances that have been made in the past 30 years, Gibson's fiction is now considered as prophetic as it is entertaining.
Unsurprisingly then, reading his 11th novel The Peripheral, the immediate confusion and disassociation that accompanies the first few chapters, with their mentions of "haptics", the "Hefty Mart", "thylacine analogs" and "Michikoids", quickly dissipates as you attune yourself to a sci-fi topography that soon settles into something strangely familiar, the origins of which become all too apparent in the world we're actually living in.
This initial confusion isn’t helped by the fact that the action – and there’s plenty of it – slips between a poverty-stricken, small rural community in an American backwater in the 2030s, the home of Flynne Fisher and her brother Burton, a town mostly populated by injured vets returned from foreign wars where the only real money to be made is from illegal drug “building”; and London in the early 2100s, a city run by the powerful “City Guilds” and “klepts” (oligarchs, mostly Russian), that has a gothic, steampunky vibe that extends to entire sections of “cosplay” streets where you can live the Dickensian London experience. Wilf Netherton, an alcoholic PR man, is our eyes and ears in this future London.
Between the two eras lies “the Jackpot”, a slow burner of an apocalypse – again, so inherently plausible in that uniquely Gibsonian way that reading the description sent a shiver down my spine: “No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves” – that killed 80 per cent of the planet’s population.
But contraband technology in the 2100s (run via a mysterious server in China, and paid for by “continua hobbyists”) allows for communication between the two eras, and, as crazy as it seems, the lives of Flynne and Wilf are about to collide. Back in the 2030s gaming is big business – wealthy enthusiasts will pay good money for a skilled player to play either for or against them – and both Flynne and Burton (an ex-Marine with post-traumatic stress disorder) are for hire.
They assume they’re playing an early prototype of a game set in a virtual world that looks like London, “but with something bigger and harder-looking grown up out of it”, but unbeknown to them they’re actually working security in the real city 70 years in the future as “part of a wealthy obsessive’s hobby set” – a future that now nevertheless doesn’t exist, since the very act of establishing the link with the past distorts the time continuum and creates “a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique”, otherwise known as a “stub” in the timeline.
The reality of the situation becomes apparent only after Flynne witnesses a murder while on shift and, as she’s the only one able to identity the perpetrator, those looking to investigate the crime organise for her to be digitally transported into their world to aid with the investigation – a process that involves donning an intricately wired headpiece, closing your eyes and counting to 15, then waking up inside a fully functional human body replica (bar digestive tract): a “peripheral”.
The exciting climatic scene is followed by an oddly mawkish, filmic concluding chapter, which sits somewhat awkwardly with the pace and tone of what’s come before, and you will inevitably find yourself rereading certain scenes in an attempt (sometimes not entirely successfully) to make sense of what’s happened, or who it’s happened to, but overall this is speculative fiction at its finest, held together by a fast-paced, action-packed plot.
I could expend paragraphs on the intricate details of Gibson’s futures – animated tattoos; huge “land-yachts” “built to tour a Russian oligarch round the Gobi desert”; the option of “induced immunity”, something only “neoprimitives” (the historical re-enactors of the future) would opt out of, some choosing the option which includes minor “heritage diseases” for a more “authentic” experience – but part of the fun is discovering all these details for oneself since the scope of his imagination, especially when it comes to technological advances, is staggering.
Lucy Scholes is a freelance journalist who lives in London.
