The Peripheral

There is a certain mythology surrounding William Gibson. According to legend, Neuromancer, his debut novel and the one in which he popularised the word “cyberspace” (a word he had previously coined), was written entirely on a typewriter. Later, when he bought his first Apple Macintosh, rumour has it that he was so alarmed by the whirring sound of the CPU that he called technical support and reported it broken. Half a lifetime ago, when I was studying the theory of information systems in first year uni, I first heard the idea (which will be familiar to sci-fi nerds of all stripes) that his greatest weakness was also the key to his strength: because he wasn’t bound by “facts” or “knowledge” about what computers could actually do, he was free to imagine what they might one day be capable of doing.

Gibson’s approach to his novels seems to be to imagine a world in its entirety, develop it and his inhabitants in his mind, and then drop the reader into the middle of it without a word of explanation about what’s going on. If we’re lucky, another character at some point will require an explanation of something, but often everything just moves along without anything as prosaic as exposition. It’s a mark of the skill with which he constructs these worlds that it only takes a few chapters for us to get the hang of things, and that, in the meantime, we accept things without requiring an explanation. (It’s also a measure of the degree of my dependence on my Kindle that I had to keep reminding myself that tapping on made-up words wasn’t going to get me a definition of them.)

Speaking of made-up words, the list of things that Gibson does well also includes naming things. “Cyberspace” wasn’t an accident, it’s just the most obvious (and catchiest) example of an undeniable gift. In this novel, the “peripheral” of the title is a human avatar that can be inhabited by a person who can’t, or doesn’t want to, be physically present. A past world that has been redirected from its course to the future is a “stub”. The race of cybernetic organisms that inhabit the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is the “patchers”.

Gibson’s prose style is terse, and has a habit of eliminating such baroque embellishments as pronouns. For the most part, it works once you get into the swing of it. If I have one complaint, it’s that his habit of rendering dialogue in the same style makes all the characters sound identical to one another. It’s not a big deal in context though, and for the most part this was a fast-moving and addictive novel that I ploughed through rapidly, and which left me wanting more.