The Peripheral arrives on PrimeVideo October 21

September 8, 2022 10:14 AM

Trailer for William Gibson's Peripheral TV series.
posted by Rash (88 comments total)

It looks good! I'm so relieved it looks good. I see the one change they made and it seems to make sense, especially when we're dealing with your lead actor.
posted by thecjm at 10:22 AM on September 8, 2022

I was going through William Gibson's IMDB page, and it surprised me to see how little of his work has been adapted for film or TV. Besides this upcoming series based on The Peripheral, it appears that only Johnny Mnemonic (based on the novella) was brought to the screen.

I would've thought Neuromancer or Idoru would have made it to the screen by now.

Pattern Recognition replaced Neuromancer as my favorite Gibson novel.
posted by zooropa at 10:39 AM on September 8, 2022 [16 favorites]

OK, yes, this looks fun. Looking forward to it!
posted by kittensyay at 10:41 AM on September 8, 2022

Seems like I should read the book. I have it for the Kindle... for a while now. Well, when I'm done with Fairy Tale.
posted by Splunge at 10:53 AM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

LOWBEER
posted by lalochezia at 10:54 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

zooropa, New Rose Hotel was made into a movie, with Christopher Walken and Willem Dafoe.
posted by Mister Moofoo at 10:57 AM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

Also

EEEEEEEEEE!
posted by Mister Moofoo at 10:58 AM on September 8, 2022

I have high hopes all set to be dashed by a cancelation after one season as people just don't get it.
posted by srboisvert at 11:05 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

weird that the trailer hypes the "mind-bending creators of Westworld" before it gets to Mr. Gibson.
posted by philip-random at 11:07 AM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

Sign me up. Recently re-read this (and Agency) and they're kind of 100% pure Gibson in a way I really like.
posted by that's candlepin at 11:08 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

it appears that only Johnny Mnemonic (based on the novella) was brought to the screen.

but was it really?
posted by Dr. Twist at 11:18 AM on September 8, 2022 [11 favorites]

well, people outside of SF circles have probably heard of Westworld
posted by kokaku at 11:21 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I take that back, Johnny Mnemonic was brought to the screen the same way The Lawnmower Man was.
posted by Dr. Twist at 11:24 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I know actors are (often) hot, but it was a weird jolt to wonder "who is that hot guy" and then come up with "Wilf" as the answer.

(None of this diminishes my excitement! I can be there for hot Wilf!)
posted by BlueBlueElectricBlue at 11:30 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Robert Longo (director) recently put out a Blu-Ray of Johnny Mnemonic in black and white and it sounds kind of cool. Like how cyberpunk should look.
posted by JoeZydeco at 11:30 AM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

weird that the trailer hypes the "mind-bending creators of Westworld" before it gets to Mr. Gibson.

The last two seasons of Westworld became a hate-watch, for me. I worry they will do the same to William Gibson's work.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:30 AM on September 8, 2022 [4 favorites]

I worry they will do the same to William Gibson's work.

The dialogue, though. "You think this is a game. But it's real."

I said "oh no" out loud.
posted by mhoye at 11:35 AM on September 8, 2022 [9 favorites]

I soooo want this to be good. I liked the book a lot, even though it seemed to be especially written for adaptation.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:44 AM on September 8, 2022

The last two seasons of Westworld became a hate-watch, for me. I worry they will do the same to William Gibson's work.

To be fair, Westworld went on far too long. With any luck, Prime will make this a one-and-done and, maybe, move on to other Gibson material.
posted by Thorzdad at 11:48 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I'm one of those people who didn't hate Johnny Mnemonic. But from Longo's description it should have been even better in a perfect world.
posted by ovvl at 12:07 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

This looks awesome, and I loved the book. Great post!
posted by lazaruslong at 12:08 PM on September 8, 2022

Count me as excited. Time to re-read the book…
posted by caution live frogs at 12:20 PM on September 8, 2022

It looks good indeed, and I was happy to get a glimpse of Ash’s tattoos. But I wanted to see Lowbeer too (or did I just miss her?)

I’m with zooropa, Pattern Recognition is my favorite Gibson novel, but I have no complaints about The Peripheral.
posted by lhauser at 12:28 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Just reread the book and liked it a lot more this time around. I hope this is good but oh I also hope all the Stub actors didn’t go to the True Blood school of Southern accents because it kind of sounded like they did.
posted by mygothlaundry at 12:38 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Youtube link to trailer for those wishing to avoid Twitter's dubious video quality.

Thank you for the heads up, Rash!
posted by angelplasma at 12:49 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Jonathan Nolan did okay with Person of Interest but the pairing up with (their wife?) Lisa Joy for Westworld was a massive disappointment to me.

Glad to see some Gibson in these days of Peak TV, but I worry that "the sky was the colour of a detuned TV channel" means that uninterrupted blue of turn-of-the-century sets that used digital image enhancements.
posted by k3ninho at 12:52 PM on September 8, 2022

Pattern Recognition replaced Neuromancer as my favorite Gibson novel.

Pattern Recognition and Agency are my favorites too. Unfortunately I had to "could not finish" The Peripheral but I'm hoping to have better success with the series.

(Also, good to see Gary Carr in the trailer. The last time I saw him was his role in The Deuce.)
posted by fuse theorem at 1:12 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

I like Pattern Recognition better than the other Blue Ants. Don’t think much of the Bridge trilogy impacted me much. Have liked The Peripheral and Agency, but not all that much.
posted by Windopaene at 1:15 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

I would've thought Neuromancer or Idoru would have made it to the screen by now.

Idoru has long been my “please adapt to a long-form series” dream.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:20 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm a long-time reader of Gibson's work, but there's something I've noticed with his recent series that I can't un-see; I really hope they correct for it in the series.

Specifically, Gibson's female protagonists are given very little to actually do. Their role is to watch as things happen around them (often these events are spectacular displays of Competence Porn.) By my count Flynne made one actual plot-affecting decision in the entire book.
posted by microscone at 1:21 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Neuromancer is still my favorite, but The Peripheral is very good, and probably the most sadly accurate vision of the future yet.
posted by star gentle uterus at 1:25 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

microscone, I feel like that's more a result of general trends in Gibson's writing. He's continually veered more and more towards systems-scale "action" rather than individual agency. Even the Sprawl Trilogy was more about vast forces interacting and people scrambling to avoid being caught in the gears.
posted by star gentle uterus at 1:29 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

I liked The Peripheral, but the trailer did not grab me at all. It felt really... generic, like they didn't want to show any specific events from the story, or any kind of personality.

I still want a proper Neuromancer movie (or TV series).
posted by Foosnark at 1:43 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I read about half of The Peripheral but put it down, perhaps unfairly, because the dialogue was bothering me. In one particular part, two characters were talking and I couldn't tell who was who. His characters too often sound too alike. That hard boiled noir thing, which is good when it's your protagonist, or bad guy, or even the prose narration, which Gibson excels at. But I'll put it back on the read pile and give it another try.

Speaking of which, last year or so I re-read Neuromancer, thinking it would be terribly dated, but I was pleasantly surprised that it wasn't. It's complex and action packed and a lot of fun, and Gibson wisely kept away from too much detail on how Case navigates cyberspace. (By contrast look at The Matrix and the attempts to show how people interface with the Matrix--doesn't look cutting edge anymore, quite the opposite). The cyberspace portion is surprisingly minimal, which is a good thing. Anyway, it totally holds up for me and I know there have been a few attempts at a movie, but it's never happened. It could totally work, as long as they don't turn it into a CGI mess.
posted by zardoz at 1:50 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

This just reminds me how badly I want a show based on 80’s style cyberpunk. Gritty cassette futurism aesthetic, wet city streets and neon-lit skyscrapers, hackers and organized crime, synthwave soundtrack—just lean the hell into it and don’t blink. This looks like what if The Matrix but trailer park? and I’m struggling to see the appeal, but then I haven’t read The Peripheral so I can’t speak to the storyline or themes.
posted by dephlogisticated at 1:52 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

This looks like what if The Matrix but trailer park? and I’m struggling to see the appeal, but then I haven’t read The Peripheral so I can’t speak to the storyline or themes.

Much of the storyline was precisely what if The Matrix but trailer park, but you say that like it's a bad thing.
posted by mhoye at 1:55 PM on September 8, 2022 [26 favorites]

I would've thought Neuromancer or Idoru would have made it to the screen by now.

The 1995 Ghost in the Shell film is the secret best film version of Neuromancer we're going to get.
posted by A Thousand Baited Hooks at 2:01 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

Since we're listing our favorites, I go with the second books in the trilogies, especially Spook Country. I'd like more Milgrim.

And now I have an answer to that query in the grey: the novel(s) I'd like to escape into would be the Bridge Trilogy.
posted by Rash at 2:02 PM on September 8, 2022 [8 favorites]

MetaFilter: What if The Matrix, but trailer park?
posted by Verg at 2:32 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

two characters were talking and I couldn't tell who was who

I feel like this happens to me with every Gibson novel — every detail counts, and crucial information is sometimes revealed so obliquely that I can’t just read everything once straight through. This is one of my favorites, and I just hope the adaptation isn’t too horrible.
posted by mubba at 3:00 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

given very little to actually do. Their role is to watch as things happen around them

I've really gotten this feeling from the newer books (Periphery and Agency) but also the Blue Ant books that I re-read recently. I love the world building, but there seems to be a very solid "things are happening, there is a world of things going on that the protagonist vaguely floats through. All the sudden, there's a big important thing that happens protagonist-adjacent, and then there's a party where all of the characters are suddenly together in one place. The world building and the details, the concepts, they really do a lot of heavy lifting, and luckily, I enjoy them enough to cover for the shortcomings.

As far as the trailer, I'm not sure the stub looks worn down enough. The other thing, and I'm sure there's star power at work here that helped to get it made, but Grace Moretz, while pretty awesome in her own right, just seems too perfectly polished here, and not at all like my image of the character in the book. Honestly, I'd kind of thought of someone closer to Julia Garner's character Ruth Langmore from Ozark. That, and Lowbeer is obviously supposed to a cross between Helen Mirren and Gillian Anderson's David Bowie-esque persona in American Gods, and I will do my best to live with the distance between that and what we get.
posted by Ghidorah at 3:16 PM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

Maybe part of his problem is that the characters with any real agency in these recent series are the billionaire class, and if they were the sympathetic protagonists, he’d be Neal Stephenson.
posted by mubba at 3:33 PM on September 8, 2022 [10 favorites]

Gibson's female protagonists are given very little to actually do.

I thought this was particularly bad in Agency (which I thought was a much worse book than The Peripheral). Verity was supposedly a world class something to do with tech but we never saw that competency used for anything. Instead she spends the book going to and doing what other entities tell her do. Which I suppose could be argued to be the illustration of her lack of Angency (boy did the overuse of that word get old in the book) but the Elon Musk stand-in got to make choices on what he wanted to do and it would have been nice if she'd done so as well.
posted by Candleman at 3:35 PM on September 8, 2022 [7 favorites]

> given very little to actually do. Their role is to watch as things happen around them

Well that's pretty much *my* role - I can't change anything either. Gibson is putting his protagonists in the role of the reader, just a lot closer to the action.
posted by technodelic at 3:52 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

Oh, I hope they don't screw this up. Peripheral is a fine futuring book.

On a different level, let's see if it gets people talking about the Jackpot before we end up living in it.
posted by doctornemo at 3:57 PM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

The point of the Jackpot is that we are living in it. It’s not a singular event, it’s the accumulation of environmental, political, social, and cultural problems that’s been building since at least the 19th century that finally comes to a head in the mid-late 21st century. The only question now is whether we can mitigate it.
posted by star gentle uterus at 4:18 PM on September 8, 2022 [12 favorites]

“Why aren’t they happy there?”

“The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point.” He took a seat at the table. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.”

She took the seat opposite. “Nothing before the 2020s has ever seemed entirely real, to me. Hard to imagine they weren’t constantly happy, given all they still had.”

—Agency, chapter 12

(This book was published in January 2020, folks.)
posted by mbrubeck at 4:53 PM on September 8, 2022 [24 favorites]

MetaFilter: What if The Matrix, but trailer park?

Metafilter: The Matrix - but trailer park!
posted by otherchaz at 5:32 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think, more than anything, the books have been buoyed by the concept of the Jackpot. He’s built a great and powerful concept/touchstone, and the books and their constant referencing, but never explaining just what it was that actually happened, that creates a hope to know more that keeps the reader motivated to real further.

The only thing that worries me is that the third book is supposed to be titled Jackpot, and I hope the big reveal isn’t disappointing. I hope he sticks the landing.
posted by Ghidorah at 5:36 PM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Yeah, like I said: I hope the tv program gets people talking about the Jackpot. It's a very powerful concept.

I think, more than anything, the books have been buoyed by the concept of the Jackpot.
I think that's right. The novel has a lot of great Gibsonian details in its near-future timeline (3d printed cronuts! meth printing!) but the future track is more interesting every year.
posted by doctornemo at 5:48 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

This reminds me that I never read Agency and really should get on that.

Was wondering if they were going to snag Sonic Youth's song "Pattern Recognition" for this until I realized that's a different trilogy.
posted by chrominance at 6:14 PM on September 8, 2022

OK. You all have done it. Gibson Derail incoming...

Necromancer was awesome when you were a 25 year old rebel. Is Case a hero or an anti-hero? But the concept of a VR world you tap into to get to stuff? I have this URL dude. So that was off the mark a bit, though a plausible thing if the walled gardens hadn't arisen.

Count Zero: Pretty great.

Mona Lisa Overdrive: Fucked up all around. I wish he had continued that story line. Mona's life versus the elite's life... Water, in a bathtub? WTF?

The Bridge: I read them all. Only thing I remember from them was The Bridge, as a concept, and the paint that would eat graffiti that was sprayed on it. Guess I need to reread those.

Pattern Recognition: The thing he does, with multiple story lines, taking place in rotating chapters...

OK.

But it's pretty solid, and I like it a lot.

Spook Country and Zero History? Whatev. Can't even remember the plot in Zero History.

The Jackpot is a terrifying, though looking more and more like a likely concept. The server in China that lets you fuck with the past? Mmmmm.

I think the Peripheral touches a lot of things about what is possible. But it is just so Ozarks grim. Agency was good.

So much rereading to do. And I'm not close to finishing Murderbot.
posted by Windopaene at 6:46 PM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

The books seem to imply that the timeline modifications happen in one direction, like the jackpot world is the one and true hub and the other worlds are just at the ends of branches, waiting to be toyed with. It would be interesting if Lowbeer and co. manage to survive the Jackpot, but have to fight for their own world's survival, fending off manipulation by another colonialist "hub" higher up the chain. Looking forward to the final book, whenever it comes out.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 6:50 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think, more than anything, the books have been buoyed by the concept of the Jackpot.

I didn't read Agency because I was told it was a huge letdown after Peripheral, but... yeah, I think the Jackpot was what sold me on Peripheral. And that part seemed only about 50% fictional when he wrote it and 40% fictional now.
posted by Foosnark at 6:51 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Necromancer was awesome when you were a 25 year old rebel.

man they said you were precocious
posted by lalochezia at 6:55 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I also hope all the Stub actors didn’t go to the True Blood school of Southern accents because it kind of sounded like they did.

Chloe Moretz, who plays Flynne, was raised in a Southern Baptist family in Georgia. In the trailer, she sounds like an real Southerner to me. (I am half-Southern by background.)
posted by Artifice_Eternity at 7:03 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Fans of this new stuff, you should know: Gibson borrowed 'the Jackpot' from a 1952, 27-page Heinlein short story, and here it is: The Year of the Jackpot.
posted by Rash at 7:46 PM on September 8, 2022 [17 favorites]

The server in China that lets you fuck with the past?
Windopaene

Technically we don't know where the server is. One of the characters just guesses China, simply because it's become (even more of) a black box to outsiders and the server doesn't seem to be anywhere else. Plausibility aside, it's one of the neater time travel mechanisms out there, and allows for some great narrative ideas.

I'd also say, re: Necromancer, that Gibson's strength has always been in portraying humanity's relationship with technology, rather than the technology itself. The specifics of the Matrix might be hokey today, but the way people interact with it, and how that alters society, aren't. I believe Gibson said the idea for the Matrix came to him when he saw some people at an arcade being so into their game that they seemed like they wanted to be inside of it.

The books seem to imply that the timeline modifications happen in one direction, like the jackpot world is the one and true hub and the other worlds are just at the ends of branches, waiting to be toyed with.
They sucked his brains out!

I don't have the book handy, but IIRC in Agency they do have the "how do you know your world isn't also a stub" conversation, and there's really no way to know it isn't.
posted by star gentle uterus at 7:50 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm heartened that there wasn't a ton of buzz about this and the trailer release is a reasonable 1-2 months before the premiere.

No ultra-hype = less inappropriate expectations.

I do like the casting of Moretz, but yes, definitely too polished/ not gritty enough. Though that could just be the Trailer being SOP and not revealing anything that 'analytics' says they shouldn't.
posted by porpoise at 8:52 PM on September 8, 2022

New Rose Hotel [fanfare.metafilter] - is an interesting project.

Willem Dafoe, Christopher Walken, Asia Argento.

Felt like an art school/ undergrad film project - which landed these actors.

As far as cassette-noir future, 'New Rose Hotel' aspires to that but the eschew-ment of effects and reframes the story as a hustle as-old-as-time, it worked very well for me.

There's purity to zero-budget projects.

Sci-Fi is both an excuse and a loosened setting to play with storytelling - and there are only so many types of stories to tell.
posted by porpoise at 8:57 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

A William Gibson post and a NIN post on the blue, in the same week? Wow. The 90s are back, baby.
posted by The River Ivel at 11:27 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

like the jackpot world is the one and true hub and the other worlds are just at the ends of branches

Well, there are characters who advance that theory throughout the books, but I don't think we as the reader are actually told unambiguously that it's the case.

Maybe it would be too obvious for Gibson, but one possible plotline would be some sort of demonstration that this assumption is incorrect. Maybe the "stubs" aren't actually stubs or simulations at all.

Certainly room to play with that, if either Gibson or the TV writers wanted to, I think.

I wonder what sort of coordination they have to do between Gibson and the writers in order to not mess up whatever future ideas he might have for the characters and world? Hopefully it's not a GRRM-type situation.
posted by Kadin2048 at 11:56 PM on September 8, 2022

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Has the meaning of this shifted since it was written? Do TVs still do dead channels? I only watch on demand and if I can't get something to run the screen just stays black.
posted by biffa at 12:28 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Well, there are characters who advance that theory throughout the books, but I don't think we as the reader are actually told unambiguously that it's the case.

You're right, of course. I'm just thinking that it would be fun for the Jackpot colonialists to find out their world sucks because it turns out they had been colonized/steered long ago, after all.
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 1:41 AM on September 9, 2022

For the record: I love all of Gibson's books and I think his latest are maybe his best. I can't think of another writer who started of magnificently and for 40 years manages to stay on that level, even getting better.

I haven't got much hope that this TV series will be good, I don't watch TV series in general, but surely will give this a try. The art looks great!
posted by Kosmob0t at 3:07 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Has the meaning of this shifted since it was written?

Yeah; it's the opening to 1984's _Neuromancer _and at the time it meant luminous grey static, but MacLeod (or maybe Stross?) wrote about the perfect unruffled blue of a tv tuned to a dead station.
posted by GCU Sweet and Full of Grace at 4:29 AM on September 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

I didn't read Agency because I was told it was a huge letdown after Peripheral

I loved The Peripheral, but then felt like Agency was basically people driving around the Bay Area in a van for 36 hours. Maybe I'm being unfair.
posted by pjenks at 5:35 AM on September 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

Do TVs still do dead channels?

Yup and Yup
posted by lalochezia at 5:48 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Agency was kind of... pointless. And I say that as someone who was absolutely floored by the peripheral.
posted by AlbertCalavicci at 5:57 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

doctornemo: I hope the tv program gets people talking about the Jackpot. It's a very powerful concept.

It struck me more like a Mcguffin: it's nominally a plot driver but it's always offscreen.

And I don't think it will animate the general public. For most people, they will half-confuse it with The Singularity, and wonder where the Jaron Lanier-types are.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:03 AM on September 9, 2022

Gibson story time. Neuromancer is the book that my sister brought back from university from her boyfriend and left behind. At fourteen I started and never made it past the first chapter. Then later that year I was home and sick on the couch and bored and started again, read the whole damn thing that day. Always going to be my favorite, crush on Molly the girl with mirror eyes and blades in her fingers. Also sorta wrong, yet sorta right? The probably illegal deck from China that's a bit black market, the hunting for the right dongle to interface with ancient systems (OMG my tech bag had half a dozen different adapters and four different cables, such was life). And I still want a computer that looks like a skull and talks, such a weird bespoke system.

Only read a few of his other things later on, but meh didn't keep up with everything. Maybe someday. Might watch the show.
posted by zengargoyle at 6:52 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

Maybe I'm being unfair.

No, that's my take as well. A very weak book.
posted by doctornemo at 8:06 AM on September 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

More on the Jackpot, from wenestvedt:

It struck me more like a Mcguffin: it's nominally a plot driver but it's always offscreen.

It is offscreen, but bracketed by the two time tracks, which lets us hone in on it. The future time track also develops the idea beyond mere Mcguffinery. And the Heinlein story adds a bit more.

And I don't think it will animate the general public. For most people, they will half-confuse it with The Singularity, and wonder where the Jaron Lanier-types are.

Too bad, and not just because it involved Jaron Lanier. Perhaps polycrisis is a more appealing term.
posted by doctornemo at 8:10 AM on September 9, 2022

Molly might be the protagonist, or at least the better character than Case. She shows up again, while Case does not.

Looking forward to the next Jackpot series book.
posted by Windopaene at 8:40 AM on September 9, 2022 [3 favorites]

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”

Has the meaning of this shifted since it was written?

Yeah, when written it was a hazy gray, now it means it's a clear blue.
posted by explosion at 8:49 AM on September 9, 2022

Considering

[s]ince we're listing our favorites, I go with the second books in the trilogies, especially Spook Country. I'd like more Milgrim

alongside

[s]pecifically, Gibson's female protagonists are given very little to actually do,

I think these both have to do with Gibson's interest in his protagonists as witnesses to moments in history. My reading of his novels is that he takes the work of observing and bearing witness as being more important than being a Driver of Great Change.

In the second books of his trilogies he has 1) established the world and is also 2) free of having to reach the culmination of the overarching narrative. I think these qualities make the second volumes of his books the most atmospheric, and Gibson has always done atmosphere and style better than plot. His books are vibes, as they say now.

The Peripheral has never been my favorite of his novels but I will allow myself to get stoked for the TV series.

But I have always thought that his male protagonists were equally passive. I'm thinking of Bobby in Count Zero, Laney in Idoru, and Milgrim in Spook Country and Zero History. All of them are along for the ride. But now I'm thinking that if I reread these books I should pay more attention to gender as it applies to Big Narrative Decisions.
posted by Handstand Devil at 9:11 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

People who have never read the book are going to get hooked about ten minutes into the first episode, is my guess. The thing I remember most about my first read-through of The Peripheral was that the language, even written in my native english tongue, made almost zero sense until about a third of the way through. That's what is great about Gibson's work-- there's no fluff exposition trying to introduce you to the world, it's just: bam. Good luck trying to keep up.

Agency is a much, much better story when you come to realize that Verity is not the main character, it's Eunice, and you're only getting the slightest view into Eunice's world. There is a whole parallel story happening within the book right under your nose, and re-reading it keeping that in mind makes it an almost completely different book.

Spoiler for non-readers!

I don't see how they could make a season 2. Trying to avert the jackpot within the stub feels like wasted potential. Maybe you'd switch stubs? Maybe season 2 is Agency, and season 3 is Jackpot?

posted by mark242 at 10:13 AM on September 9, 2022 [5 favorites]

“The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”


To add onto the forty year old derail, but with a bit of local (dead television) color, I live in Chiba prefecture, and have lived in Chiba city for all but eight months of the twenty-two odd years I've lived in Japan.

I interviewed for a teaching position in Japan when I was finishing up a year of teaching in China, and was offered a position. They said they were looking to fill two positions, one in Nara, and one in Chiba. I was ecstatic, as I had absolutely loved Nara when I visited as a student two years before, and had had a homestay with an absolutely wonderful family there, and was excited to go back.

As for Chiba, literally the only thing I knew of it was that opening line, which had popped into my head immediately. Move forward a bit, and the language school people picked me up from Narita airport, and in the car on the way to the house they had for stashing new teachers until their apartments were ready, they let me know a teacher who'd arrived earlier had snagged the Nara assignment, and I'd be teaching in Chiba, specifically near Goi station in Ichihara. I was a little crestfallen, but decided to give it a try. I had a couple weeks to kill before my position started, so I went down to Goi, and dear god, it was absolutely terrible. A combination of deep suburb commuters to jobs in Tokyo that didn't pay well enough to live somewhere better and industrial refinery hellhole along the bay. The air was chewable with smog. I did my time, and jumped to a high school teaching position the second I was able, eight months of seeing Tokyo bound trains and thinking "freedom" weakly in my mind later.

The thing is, along the bay, especially around the port area of Chiba, while they have done their best to turn it into a residential area, it's still largely lined with refineries and factories, and the haze they create down there (luckily a decent distance from where we live) traps in the light, and trust me, there is a lot of light pollution in Japan. Unless there's a solid wind (being a bay, there often is), the haze sits there, the lights bounce off of it, and yeah, it looks like a tv from the 80s that someone fell asleep in front of, and missed the nightly sign off.

Hell, if you think trying to explain TV static would be hard for someone who's never seen it, imagine trying to convince them that TV stations used to turn off every day.
posted by Ghidorah at 10:32 AM on September 9, 2022 [17 favorites]

Agency is a much, much better story when you come to realize that Verity is not the main character, it's Eunice, and you're only getting the slightest view into Eunice's world.

I got that, I just didn't find the book very interesting. The whole klept plotline was resolved more or less Deus ex Machina to the point that it could have been left out entirely (unless there's a clever callback to it in the 3rd book), as noted above the stub plotline just kind of revolves around traveling around the bay area, and I hated how he turned Rainey from a smarter than Wilf publicist into the Urkle of the plot.

To your point, there's a much more interesting story lurking under the surface but it felt like they fed The Peripheral into GPT-3 and said to write a sequel in the style of Neal Stephenson (disappointing last 3rd of the book and all).
posted by Candleman at 10:36 AM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

i hope this was intentionally sly on Gibson's part, but i read the titles as being commentary on the story.

the main character is almost peripheral to the first book and has little agency in the second, which to me feels like commentary on the ways capitalism feeds us a story of control over our lives despite the overarching lack of control we often have.

also, could be Gibson making fun of himself for the ways that current events keep eclipsing what he's trying to do with his books (something he's commented on in various places).
posted by kokaku at 11:06 AM on September 9, 2022 [2 favorites]

> In one particular part, two characters were talking and I couldn't tell who was who.

I've been having the same problem and it's left me with a feeling that he's writing these parts to be intentionally impenetrable and it's been making it difficult for me to continue with the book.

In contrast, I've been (re)reading a bunch of Iain M Banks and have read a few chapters written in this unattributed-dialogue style, some of it without even closing parentheses to mark a change in speaker. Not only did I not have any difficulty determining who the speakers were, I found this style to be perfectly suited to the style of conversation that was happening.
posted by WaylandSmith at 12:06 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

In my mind all of the scenes in Flynne's timeline/stub should be a lot more rundown. The airstream and the 3d print-mat look way too clean and well kept. The people too for that matter. I'm picturing 20+ years from now of the same hollowing out of rural America, meth, and people having to work multiple gigs just to barely get by.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 1:34 PM on September 9, 2022 [4 favorites]

any portmanteau, I completely agree. Even down to the spray foam that was talked about in the book, I imagine that any tech that's significantly advanced from where we are now would be similar tech to what seems to be we are focusing on now: not ways to rebuild or improve what we have, but ways to patch it up and keep the main function of things working as long as possible. At this point, unless science fiction builds in to its premise a believable new dawn/enlightenment sort of moment, I'll reject any kludge-free vision of the future.

We might not be able to make new things anymore, but goddamn if we aren't consistently creating better versions of duct tape to hold it all together.
posted by Ghidorah at 1:44 PM on September 9, 2022 [7 favorites]

but if they make it too ugly, it looks too much like now?
posted by hearthpig at 7:25 PM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

hearthpig, to me, if they could pull of what Looper did, that’s pretty much my image of the books. Set a couple decades from now, but mostly looking like what we’ve got. Adapters to keep things running for most people, barely working fancy stuff for the rich, with trickle down dollar store versions for the rest of us. It’s Gibson after all, unevenly distributed is the way of things.
posted by Ghidorah at 8:19 AM on September 10, 2022 [1 favorite]

The thing I remember most about my first read-through of The Peripheral was that the language, even written in my native english tongue, made almost zero sense until about a third of the way through.

Can you say a bit more about that? Are you referring to the future timeline?
posted by doctornemo at 11:20 AM on September 10, 2022

I think he uses a lot of "created slang" in his dialog. Which, is appropriate. But it does take a few moments to realize what that slang means. And using "Haptic", which a lot of readers won't instantly get.

I will watch this. And probably be yelling at the screen, "that wasn't what's supposed to happen!"

And given the opening, a grim start to a show.

But, Lowbeer has got this
posted by Windopaene at 12:52 PM on September 10, 2022

The thing I remember most about my first read-through of The Peripheral was that the language, even written in my native english tongue, made almost zero sense until about a third of the way through. That's what is great about Gibson's work-- there's no fluff exposition trying to introduce you to the world, it's just: bam. Good luck trying to keep up.

Yes, I completely agree. I think that I tried Gibson years before actually reading him and couldn't get a handle on anything. In reading The Peripheral I read the first 50 pages and had no idea what was going on. Then, a few weeks later, I started all over again and finally found the key. It's just like mark242 said: Gibson just drops you into the world assuming you know everything already, including all the shit he's made up. It's so immersive and satisfying to not have any distractions of exposition, but it takes a bit to get into it. And, for me, it took a higher concentration than I usually bring.

And, yes, drnemo, it was the future timeline that I couldn't parse very well on the first read. But also, as zardoz mentioned: it takes real effort to hear whose dialogue is whose.
posted by pjenks at 4:59 PM on September 11, 2022