"The Peripheral" by William Gibson

An audio book

Flynn likes retro-tech. She uses a bicycle that charges up as she pedals. She does some work for her brother Burton, testing a computer game. But is it really a game? She sees a woman (Elita West) being murdered. While she's in the game she's being watched. Someone tries to kill Burton thinking he was the witness. A detective, Lobeer, questions her.

It's possible to access the future 70 years ahead. There are wind-walkers and patchers, augmented reality and avatars that are rentable like fancy dress. Flynn "visits" the future London using a full body haptic suit to control a life-like robot (a peripheral). It's one of many possible futures (stubs), so it's not a good predictor of Flynn's life, but it's possible to use the future's computers to do calculations and report the results back to the present. Ash and Netherton live in the future.

She's told that Jackpot killed 80% of the population over 40 years. No dramatic crises, but pressure of climate change and collapse of social structures. She wanders around new London - almost deserted. Speakers Corner is still there. So are historical re-creations.

There are ways to print food. Reality TV has merged into politics and performance art. Hobbyists enjoy going back in time. Lobeer seems more than a detective. She's old enough to have been around in flynn's world. Elita West was the sister of Wilf's ex, Daydra West, an artist who covers herself with auto-biographical tattoos, sells her skin and has a new skin put on. Flynn goes to a party hosted by Daydra to see if she can identify Elita's murderer there.

All of a sudden, loose ends are tidied up.

Gibson uses food, drink and brand names to help ground us in reality.

Other reviews

• Sam Leith (One of the great pleasures of Gibson’s fiction – though he is canny enough to include periodic expository info-dumps to help the confused catch up – is that sense of not being spoon-fed: his futures convince because the reader arrives in them as a tourist and learns their languages by immersion. In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered ... The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. We are in a smallish town in the US ...The two worlds are linked because the later world contains a black-market technology, popular among hobbyists called “continua enthusiasts”, that allows people to reach into the past. ... Gibson is such a polished and propulsive writer that you nearly won’t notice that the plot is sort of a mess, that he’s peopled the novel with too many characters too sketchily delineated, that hinted-at arcs involving the macroeconomy of Flynne’s stub and a plot to assassinate the president are cursorily wrapped up, and that the ending – from the imagination that brought us Neuromancer – needs only a “Goonight, John-Boy” to be The Waltons.)
• jenora vaswani (Gibson's use of a protagonist being introduced to a new world, her future, also eases the reader's transition into an unfamiliar technological setting. ... The resolution of the plot feels a little shaky. The bearded man symbolised Flynn's drive to learn more about this future world, yet he dies abruptly without providing the reader with much backstory. Considering the whole book has been about discovering the circumstances surrounding this mysterious man, a little more detail would have been appreciated.)

"Burning Chrome" by William Gibson (Gollanz, 2016)

First published in 1986, this story collection includes 3 collaborations. "Gibson is the Raymond Chandler of SF", according to the Observer on the back cover.

"Johnny Mnemonic" is crammed with ideas and atmosphere. In "The Belonging Kind" Coretti's an outsider - "Clothing was a language and Coretti a kind of sartorial stutterer" (p.49). He's stalking another outsider, a women, who seems to change. The trek from bar to bar reminds me of John Cheever's "The Swimmer". Is she an alien? I liked much of "Hinterlands". "The Winter Market" held my attention - "Trash fires gutter in steel canisters around the Market. The snow still falls and kids huddle over the flames like arthritic crows, hopping from foot to foot, wind whipping their dark coats. Up in Fairview's arty slum-tumble, someone's laundry has frozen solid on the line, pink squares of bedsheets standing out against the background dinge and the confusion of satellite dishes and solar panels. Some ecologist's eggbeater windmill goes round and round, round and round, giving a whirling finger to the Hydro rates."

"Burning Chrome" is set in a world I'm familiar with from his novels - icebreakers and black ice. "Somewhere we have bodies, very far away, in a crowded loft roofed with steel and glass. Somewhere we have microseconds, maybe time left to pull out. We've crashed her gates disguised as an audit and three subpoenas".

Other reviews

• Adi Robertson
• Ted Gioia
• Nader Elhefnawy (Gibson's storytelling can be as muddled as his prose style can be dazzling, the strength of his plotting and descriptions of the action inconsistent for all of the flash of a single word choice or sentence ... "Continuum" works well, in part, because it is rooted in Gibson's strengths (his eye for detail, his strong sensibility about past, present and future) rather than his weaknesses (like his plotting) ... "The Winter Market" requires Casey to get inside Leni in the most literal, technological terms, as Gibson only rarely does in his focus on surface detail. The result here is not only one of Gibson's best composed stories, but perhaps the most resonant expression of the loneliness and alienation of the future he describes in the entire collection.)