![]() ![]() ![]() In The Peripheral, Gibson gives us not one future, but two, both existing in relation to one another, both on each other’s periphery. The result is, in its way, as revolutionary as Neuromancer, the novel that made him famous. Gibson has re-calibrated what he calls his “yardstick” for the future. Spoilers must necessarily follow.Īfter eleven years, William Gibson has returned to tomorrow, having spent his last trilogy of novels exploring the “speculative fiction of the very recent past.” The future, it seems, caught up with Gibson, and he took a step back to take its measure before diving back into sci-fi. Like a lungfish that eventually becomes a hominin, the iPhone evolves into entire worlds inside Gibson’s mind. What struck me, though, was that as I held this iPhone I was looking at the putative form of the technology Gibson creates in the novel. I found Newgate to be much as he described in the book, though the picture he downloaded into my head was far cooler. He writes with the expectation that the reader can look up obscure places and references with the aid of Google. For his past two novels, William Gibson has assumed there exists an invisible cloud tag surrounding his work. Toward the end of The Peripheral, I had cause to use my iPhone to look up Newgate Prison in London. ![]()
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