The Peripheral
Now a major new TV series with Amazon Prime
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4.3 • 104 Ratings
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Discover the cult classic behind the major new TV adaption from the creators of Westworld, starring Chloe Grace Moretz.
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'Big-screen, popcorn-chewing thrills' Guardian
Flynne Fisher lives in the rural American South, working at the local 3D printing shop, while earning much needed extra money playing VR games for rich people. One night she dons a headset and finds herself in futuristic London-a sleek and mysterious world, alluringly different from her own hardscrabble existence. But this isn't like any game she's ever played before: Flynne begins to realize it isn't virtual reality... it's real.
Someone in London, seventy years in the future, has found a way to open a door to Flynne's world. And as utterly beguiling as London is... it's also dangerous. As Flynne searches to discover who has connected their worlds, and for what purpose, her presence here sets dangerous forces into motion...forces intent on destroying Flynne and her family in her own world.
The Peripheral is master storyteller William Gibson's dazzling, hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of mankind - and what lies beyond.
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'Mesmerizing, captivating, haunting' Sunday Times
'Frightening, plausible. Not just a unique and brilliantly talented SF novelist but a social and psychological visionary' The Times
'Frantic with imagination and frantic with the appetite to see what happens next' Observer
'A swirlingly philosophical quantum daydream of drones and bodyswapping' Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seminal cyberpunk author Gibson, who has spent the last several years writing the more-or-less present-day Zero History series of novels, returns to the future with this slow-burning thriller, ambitiously structured on either side of an economic and ecological collapse known afterward as "the jackpot." In the hardscrabble "pre-jackpot America" of our near future, gamer Flynne Fisher is covering a beta-testing shift for her ex-Marine brother when she witnesses what she thinks is a gruesome murder "some kind of nanotech chainsaw fantasy." In a depopulated London decades post-jackpot, Wilf Netherton, a disgraced publicist, is caught unawares when his latest client s sister disappears. The resulting investigation kicks Gibson's discursive narrative into high gear as Flynne, allowed across time lines by use of a "peripheral" ("an anthropomorphic drone... a telepresence avatar"), proves to be exactly the savvy, principled ally that enigmatic Det. Insp. Ainsley Lowbeer has been looking for. If the mechanics of time-travel are sometimes murky, the stakes are crystal clear when Flynne reaches out from Wilf's past to alter her own future. All of Gibson's characters are intensely real, and Flynne is a clever, compelling, stereotype-defying, unhesitating protagonist who makes this novel a standout.
Customer Reviews
Best Gibson yet
Immensely enjoyable, as always with very terse and concise prose. Prose that causes the first 50-75 pages to only open up to full understanding retrospectively; strange experience upon first read-through. Gibson also somehow manages to counterbalance the futuristic tech environment with nuanced scoping of the interior mental and emotional worlds of characters, all in all a highly recommended read.
Not much happening
All great future-scoping stuff - I mean it’s Gibson, innit. But it just goes on a bit. Not entirely sure where the editor was but seems to have checked out. Something happens then not much happens then there’s an enormous amount of build up to something else happening and then it happens in a few pages and it’s over and everyone gets partnered up, has babies and drinks coffee - modern cyberpunk fairytale.
A short story made long. Watch the TV series and be happy.
Gave up
Pretty much unintelligible, felt like I’d started on the second book by mistake.