The Peripheral

By many critical standards, William Gibson’s Neuromancer was the first cyberpunk novel. Thus, Gibson’s work has helped to define the genre. In Neuromancer, Gibson pits a renegade young man, an outsider with drug problems, against mega forces that rule the world. His unique expertise in cyberspace enables him to become a kind of chosen one. The world of Neuromancer is a dark, hopeless place, one in which corporate control of the masses is near absolute. Neuromancer helped establish a lineage of the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction. Gibson’s The Peripheral shares many of the same tropes as his seminal cyberpunk novel, with important modifications that help push the subgenre in new directions.

One of the first hallmarks of a cyberpunk novel is that it usually involves marginalized groups of people who are empowered by their technical acumen. Flynne and Burton Fisher fit this description. Burton is a wounded veteran who may or may not suffer from PTSD. He has a short fuse and is prone to violent outbursts. He and his posse of veterans form a kind of non-conformist clique. These are not nihilistic punks in the traditional sense, but their outsider status fits the general description of punk-like characters. His sister Flynne is not the antihero archetype seen in other cyberpunk fiction. She has a clear moral conscience that informs her behavior, and while she finds herself drawn into a series of events that challenges her conception of reality, she does not stray from that code. Flynne is sometimes brash and charismatic, but she is a more developed character than many other heroes in the cyberpunk genre.

Cyberpunk novels generally have a dystopian setting, often taking place in some post-apocalyptic world. In The Peripheral, this is certainly the case. The novel takes place in two different worlds and two different eras. In the near future, Gibson portrays the world as sliding toward the dystopian world depicted in future London. Technology has become more than a tool for human life; it is all-encompassing. It is fully integrated into daily life and is overbearing. In the novel’s future, technology shapes reality. Detective Lowbeer says at one point that nobody really knows how the algorithms work, suggesting that the singularity has been reached and humans are no longer in control of their environment. The future London portrayed in the novel examines what being human really means when technology becomes so omnipresent.

The Peripheral leans on many other cyberpunk tropes as it weaves together two different plots. It explores posthumanism, portrays the limits of cybernetics, and has an old-fashioned detective story at its core. Significantly, the novel also describes the world after climate change has destroyed most life on the planet. The catastrophe that destroys civilization is not a singular, dramatic event, but one that takes place gradually. By the time civilization decides to do something, it is already too late. This creates an inherent tragic undercurrent in the novel, and it is elaborated upon rather than treated cursorily. Generally, The Peripheral fits into the cyberpunk subgenre of science fiction and pushes it in new directions.