From the pen of prolific science fiction author William Gibson comes a novel set in not one, but two futures.
In one of the futures in The Peripheral, gamer Flynne Fisher and her ex-Marine Corps brother witness a gruesome murder. Fast forward to another future where a London publicist Wilf Netherton discovers that her client’s sister has disappeared. The two futures become connected by means of a peripheral, “a telepresence avatar” that allows Flynne to travel between the two eras.
William Gibson has shared an excerpt from the first four chapters of The Peripheral on his website. In the first and second chapter the reader meets Flynne, her brother Burton and Wilf and the strange worlds they inhabit. It’s been 20 years since Gibson released his seminal science fiction novel, Neuromancer, and some critics say The Peripheral harks back to his original 1980s vision of cyberpunk.
Read the extract:
1. THE HAPTICS
They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him. They said it was like phantom limb, ghosts of the tattoos he’d worn in the war, put there to tell him when to run, when to be still, when to do the bad- ass dance, which direction and what range. So they allowed him some disability for that, and he lived in the trailer down by the creek. An alcoholic uncle lived there when they were little, veteran of some other war, their father’s older brother. She and Burton and Leon used it for a fort, the summer she was ten. Leon tried to take girls there, later on, but it smelled too bad. When Burton got his discharge, it was empty, except for the biggest wasp nest any of them had ever seen. Most valuable thing on their property, Leon said. Airstream, 1977. He showed her ones on eBay that looked like blunt rifle slugs, went for crazy money in any condition at all. The uncle had gooped this one over with white expansion foam, gone gray and dirty now, to stop it leaking and for insulation. Leon said that had saved it from pickers. She thought it looked like a big old grub, but with tunnels back through it to the windows.
Coming down the path, she saw stray crumbs of that foam, packed down hard in the dark earth. He had the trailer’s lights turned up, and closer, through a window, she partly saw him stand, turn, and on his spine and side the marks where they took the haptics off, like the skin was dusted with something dead- fish silver. They said they could get that off too, but he didn’t want to keep going back.
“Hey, Burton,” she called.
“Easy Ice,” he answered, her gamer tag, one hand bumping the door open, the other tugging a new white t‑shirt down, over that chest the Corps gave him, covering the silvered patch above his navel, size and shape of a playing card.
Book details
- The Peripheral by William Gibson
EAN: 9780399158445
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