Gibson is back- this is the old Gibson, the Gibson of Neuromancer, Burning Chrome and Mona Lisa Overdrive, not the more recent Gibson of Pattern Recognition and Spook Country. The ‘late period’ Gibson is a more realistic writer, and while his novels are still speculative fiction, they seem to be set in the science fiction we call reality. The old Gibson owned the future in the same way Heinlein did, showed us the mirror-shades that will be our tomorrow a tomorrow, and The Peripheral has that too.
It’s a tale of two near futures, the one, a rural southern America just this side of apocalypse, the other a post-apocalyptic London. These two are joined by a time travel connection (in the form of a mysterious Chinese supercomputer) that can pass information back in time- and thus alter the future- but not material objects. Since the passed information alters the past, it splits the timeline into a parallel world. The future London is waging an information war (what other kind would there be?) in the Appalachian future to solve a murder in its own time.
For me, the part that pulls me in best is Gibson’s view of his protagonist Flynne Fisher’s rural southern America, a view so dead-on that our soon-to-be world looks like it will be torn from his pages.
It’s complicated, heady, and has that ‘it’s bound to be’ weight and heft. It’s early innings, but I’ll predict this is the next Hugo winner.