The Peripheral by William Gibson

This review first appeared in The Sunday Business Post in February 2015.

*

Critics who don’t read much science fiction tend to call successful science fiction writers “prophets” – as if science fiction were a set of Tarot cards, or as if J.G. Ballard (say) were seriously warning us that the planet might one day turn into a giant maze of crystals. But SF has never been about prediction. Kingsley Amis came closest to articulating SF’s true purpose when he called his 1961 study of the genre New Maps of Hell.  SF, at its best, is the visionary literature of our time, charting the infernos that we have already made. Set alongside the retrograde medievalism of contemporary fantasy, SF starts to look like the most grown-up of popular genres.

If this is so, it’s largely thanks to William Gibson.  Gibson, of course, began as a science fiction writer – maybe the most important science fiction writer of the 1980s. He minted new words (“cyberspace,” “microsoft”) that sounded like they’d been around forever. More vitally, with his very first novel, Neuromancer (1984), he minted – or consolidated – a brand-new style: a noirish high-tech vision of the very near future. Critics at the time called it cyberpunk, a word that now comes wrapped in its own nimbus of fuzzy nostalgia. Cyberpunk mapped a very 1980s Hell, all matte-black hardware and corporate malfeasance. It didn’t seem like where we were going; it seemed like where we already were.

It was a high point. For much of the 1990s, Gibson seemed to be marking time. But with the advent of the new century his focus shifted: the SF Hell he was interested in charting now looked almost exactly like the contemporary world. The Blue Ant Trilogy – Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010) – gave us a new Gibson: mainstream heir to Pynchon and DeLillo, tech-savvy tracer of the shimmering horizons of our mediated globe.

Fredric Jameson has pointed out that in a postmodern age (evacuated of meaning, lacking in affect, deprived of motive), we can experience the world only as a series of self-conscious postures or styles. The Blue Ant Trilogy embodies this apercu with eerie grace: in these novels everything – character, setting, plot, theme, imagery – boils down to an encounter with style. Gibson’s protagonists are hyperalert to the material circumstances of their alienated worlds: they clock the matte-black limousines, the microfiber jackets, the bleeding edge computer tech. They observe things like “polymers” (in Pattern Recognition, Cayce Pollard notices that an empty refrigerator smells of “long-chain monomers”). They drift through Gibson’s weirdly suspenseless narratives like freelance style journalists (Hollis Henry, in Spook Country, is literally a freelance style journalist), taking the temperature of the contemporary, never seriously threatened by the buoyantly Pynchonian conspiracies in which they find themselves enmeshed.

Now, with The Peripheral, Gibson has returned to full-fledged science fiction. The new novel is set unequivocally in the future – in two futures, to be precise. For hardcore Gibson fanboys, this will be an exciting prospect. For the general reader, however, it will probably feel like a large step backwards.

The plot of The Peripheral is complicated without being particularly involving. There are two time zones: Near Future and Slightly Farther Future. In the Near Future, dropout Flynne Fisher’s army vet brother Burton beta-tests virtual reality games for shady operators. As the novel begins, Flynne finds herself covering for Burton. Piloting a drone in what she takes to be a boringly realistic game, she is drawn into an assassination. Meanwhile, in the Slightly Farther Future, international spook Wilf Netherton finds himself investigating, via an internet connection to the past, the assassination Flynne committed in what was (of course) not a virtual reality game. Got that? Me neither; and after 486 pages, I was scarcely the wiser.

At his best (as in the Blue Ant novels), Gibson’s pages audition image after fugitive image of our money-glazed, post-everything century. At his worst – as in The Peripheral – his sentences stumble over their own too-cool-for-school feet. “They didn’t think Flynne’s brother had PTSD, but that sometimes the haptics glitched him.” “Netherton was fully as annoyed with the bohemian nonsense of Ash’s workspace as he would have expected to be.”

Gibson’s vaunted stylishness has always been a matter of carefully managed ellipsis: the know-it-all asides, the tough-guy imagist poetry. In the early novels this could engender moments of epigrammatic richness (Neuromancer: “In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it”). But in The Peripheral Gibson’s obliquity has become an obstacle to readerly pleasure. The prose is chequered with neologisms (“klept,” “polt,” “moby,” “patchers”) and obscurities (“haptics,” “thylacine”), and the syntax is riddled with needless conditionals. Simply put, it’s often hard to tell what’s going on. Worse, it’s even harder to care. The vision that gave rise to Gibson’s style has gone AWOL, leaving only the style behind – a very Gibsonian predicament.