The Peripheral

Gibson, William. The Peripheral'. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2014 (1st edition 28 Oct. 2014). Available on Kindle and an unabridged Penguin audiobook.

Peripheral is described by Zach Baron as "basically a noirish murder mystery wearing a cyberpunk leather jacket," and this is correct.[1] The interest of the novel, and its significance here, is its setting in two technodystopic futures: one set in rural America not too long after 2014 in the 21st century, the other a bit over "seventy years later, in the early 22nd century, […] in London several decades after an apocalyptic event known as the Jackpot."[2] By a process that might as well be magical — but is said top be mediated by a quantum computer server — "continua" enthusiasts of the more distant future can transmit data to and receive data from their past, the audience's closer future, and manipulate it. Since the contact with the past in the further future had not happened, the nearer future breaks off into a "stub," and nothing that happens in the new past can affect the further future with which it is in contact. (You needn't understand any of that to enjoy the novel or understand this annotation.) The near future dystopia includes 3-D printing on a large scale and central to the economy; the further future includes "Assemblers" that can be expressed in incredibly productive construction machines or become deadly nanobots; and there are, of course, in both worlds, drones and biological agents and other nifty weapons and surveillance devices. Central to the story are "peripherals" and the ability to set up precursors to "peripherals" in the stub. The further-future people produce a primitive precursor to a "peripheral" when one of the far future characters takes over — as an IT person nowadays might commandeer your computer to fix a problem — takes over a "Wheelie-Boy": a kind of miniature [Segway|http://tinyurl.com/kofs6m3] with a tablet on it like the next-generation iPad. We see more advanced peripherals in the future, with a very elegant, male-gendered sparring-partner run by a major male character and a female-gendered android robot taken over by the female hero. By the end of this long novel, we see peripherals that are child-like (the Wheelie-Boy), macho (with mediation via a "homunculus"), feminine, neuter (what seems to be a very large red cube) — and human-driven and AI-driven. Note well the cybernetically-accomplished human "occupation" of these devices, making them "peripherals" in the sense of extensions of human bodies; and note well human interaction with these entities: interfacing intellectually and emotionally. Gibson is too humanistic in Peripheral to give us "and they married and lived happily ever after" for a human/Wheelie-Boy relationship across time, but in the world of this novel such a relationship is thinkable.

RDE, 17/III/15