The Peripheral by William Gibson

The Peripheral by William Gibson

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I've loved Gibson since Neuromancer and The Peripheral doesn't disappoint.

Gibson likes to throw you in at the deep end, where nothing makes sense. I eventually figured that what I really needed for this book was to have my left eye reading one page, while my right eye was reading two pages ahead—everything has an explanation, and he doesn't leave you waiting too long to get it, but you're going to spend those two pages completely baffled. And of course, by the time you understand one thing that had you perplexed, two more mysteries have arisen.

The story's taking place in two time periods: the first is maybe a couple of decades from now, and the second is seventy years after that (though not strictly the first period's future!). In that later period, a method has been found to communicate with earlier times, but that communication necessarily changes the past, resulting in the two timelines diverging from each other. It also necessarily causes a fair bit of brain pain in the reader...

I loved the characters and the plot, though some of the motivations seemed weak (sure Daedra is a spoiled brat, but it's not in the nature of spoiled brats to do something for nothing—providing her with a motivation would be easy, but it didn't happen). What do the conspirators get? It doesn't seem enough, but perhaps that's the whole point: that sometimes great evil is done for the most banal of reasons. As Flynne recalls her mother saying, "…evil wasn't glamourous but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room … to become its bigger self."

There was just one point where it became impossible to suspend my disbelief: "Jimmy's breakfast burritos were gross. Scrambled eggs and chopped-up bacon, green onions." WTF?