For the last decade William Gibson has found the contemporary world more than congenial to his themes of surveillance, conspiracy and transformative technological innovation. The loose trilogy of Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History was set in the aftermath of the September 11 bombings, in a world of shadowy intelligence agencies and extraordinary rendition: in a postmodern, Gibson-esque twist, the news headlines almost made science fiction redundant.
Now, though, with The Peripheral, Gibson has finally returned to the near future with a stunning meditation on identity, agency and embodiment that reads with all the urgency of a thriller.
In an America on the verge of economic collapse, Flynne Fisher lives in a world where the only sources of employment are drugs manufacturing, 3D printing or hiring yourself out as a player in online video games. Standing in for her brother Burton, Flynne takes a job running security inside a game set in a curiously depopulated future London.
Witnessing a savage murder in a hi-tech apartment block, Flynne and Burton are soon contacted by Wilf Netherton, who warns them about an imminent attack on their lives in an attempt to silence them.
As it turns out, the game is actually their world 70 years in the future, after an environmental/economic catastrophe known as "the jackpot", which coincided with a period of vast technological innovation: "progress accompanied by constant violence". Netherton had hired Burton as security to impress his client and occasional lover, Daedra West, "a cross between a slightly porny media star and … maybe a kind of diplomat". It was Daedra's sister, Aelita, whom Flynne saw being killed.
From Netherton's era, access to the past comes through a computer server, possibly based in China, the workings of which remain pleasingly opaque even to the characters who use it.
Under the cryptic direction of Ainsley Lowbeer, the Metropolitan Police officer investigating the Aelita West killing, Netherton and his family, who have links to the Russian mafia, try to help Flynne through a kind of temporal imperialism, "third-worlding alternate continua" by manipulating its economy in Flynne's favour.
For Flynne more fully to access the future and help with their investigation, she ports into a synthetic body known as a "peripheral". Moving between her own body and her peripheral's, Flynne becomes a key player in the events that could either cause or prevent the jackpot from taking place, at least in her own timezone, while Netherton becomes increasingly taken with the "gloriously pre-posthuman" world, where people are still to an extent the agents of their fate, unencumbered by the spiritually and ethically deadening effects of technology.
As should now be apparent, The Peripheral's complex plot almost resists summary. Gibson throws out a dozen extraordinary ideas per page, from self-scrambling private languages to animated tattoos, from embedded phones to semi-autonomous algorithms.
A narrative craftsman as well as a visionary, he plays out just enough information to prevent the reader from feeling overwhelmed, while allowing his explanations to unfold naturally through character and action. There are occasional stumbles, but it takes great skill to orchestrate a richly textured world with this much success, and without holding up its phenomenal narrative drive.
At the same time, for all its imaginative power, I wondered if there wasn't something metaphysically conservative at work here.
The ease with which characters can port between bodies, from the real to the peripheral, shows a writer firmly on the dualist, Cartesian side of the mind-body divide, where there exists an essential 'I' inside us, and where the body is no more than a vehicle for consciousness.
It's not without its ethical or psychological risks, as Gibson makes clear, but there is something faintly reductive about the novel's attitude to the self as an extra-material thing, with the ability to move between bodies just a question of finding the right software.
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