Buy it from Amazon
| First Written | 2014 |
| Genre | Scifi |
| Origin | US |
| Publisher | Putnam Adult |
| ISBN-10 | 0399158448 |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0399158445 |
| My Copy | library hardback |
| First Read | December 30, 2014 |
The Peripheral
Years later, The Peripheral has one big idea that's really stuck for me (much like "CPUs" from Pattern Recognition). In this book, the Jackpot is what the future-denizens call the interlocked feedback loops of climate change, natural disasters, pandemics, financial collapse, crop failures, mass migrations, wars, etc that happen in the 21st century. But it also includes all the rapid technical advances that humanity produce in order to mitigate these disasters. By the end of the Jackpot, most of humanity is dead, but the people that didn't die now live like kings in a post-scarcity world, where they have abundant clean energy, nanobots, basically anything and everything they could want or need. It's the Jackpot, you see, because the survivors are the lottery winners.
It sounded like scifi material at first, but now it's really my dominant mental schema for climate-related problems in the world. Every year a more devastating wildfire season? That's the Jackpot. New deadly pandemic? Hello 2020 Jackpot.
Noted on June 10, 2021
It's less like the Bigend / Blue Ant books, which are set in the modern day (and which I really like), and more like early cyberpunk Gibson. The plot is alternately set in an indeterminate Near Future - slightly extrapolated from today - and a Further Future, where the real scifi shit goes down. The connection, such as it is, isn't really delineated until one hundred pages in. Gibson rolls out his Necromancer-era dense writing style, where he's packing in jargon and future-speak and dense allusions, so that first hundred pages is bewildering and fun, if not particularly comprehensible on the first read-through. It was great, except for its predictable, boring climax.
Noted on January 9, 2015
50 pages into The Peripheral and I'm totally as lost as I was when we started.
Noted on January 9, 2015
"Those fuckers,” Janice said, meaning the football players, “they get me doing hate Kegels."
Quoted on January 9, 2015
A few stray bits of Lego edged fitfully about among lower strata, like bright rectilinear beetles.
Quoted on January 9, 2015
Conspiracy theory’s got to be simple. Sense doesn’t come into it. People are more scared of how complicated shit actually is than they ever are about whatever’s supposed to be behind the conspiracy.
Quoted on January 9, 2015
That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.
Quoted on January 9, 2015
So now, in her day, he said, they were headed into androgenic, systemic, multiplex, seriously bad shit, like she sort of already knew, figured everybody did, except for people who still said it wasn't happening, and those people were mostly expecting the Second Coming, anyway.
Quoted on January 9, 2015