The Peripheral

February 2, 2015
Reader King does a fine job presenting this complex tale of alternate futures, nefarious plots, time travel, and gruesome crimes. In the not-so-distant-future, gamer Flynne Fisher is covering a beta-testing shift for her ex-Marine brother when she witnesses what she thinks is a murder—“some kind of nanotech chainsaw fantasy.” This new game connects Flynne, her brother, and their friends to a fantastical future world, where Flynne learns that her life in the present is in danger. King is handed a lot in this reading—shifting time periods, different points of view, tons of sci-fi speak, and a multitude of characters—and she handles it all with consummate skill. Her characters, especially the smart and sardonic Flynne, are nicely portrayed with precise individual personalities that fit perfectly. Her pacing is spot-on, never bogging down even when the story calls for a lot of exposition. In lesser hands such expository passages would grind this book to a mind-numbing halt, but King’s intelligent and engaging reading holds the listener solidly from one disc to the next. A Putnam hardcover.

Starred review from September 1, 2014
Seminal cyberpunk author Gibson, who has spent the last several years writing the more-or-less present-day Zero History series of novels, returns to the future with this slow-burning thriller, ambitiously structured on either side of an economic and ecological collapse known afterward as “the jackpot.” In the hardscrabble “pre-jackpot America“ of our near future, gamer Flynne Fisher is covering a beta-testing shift for her ex-Marine brother when she witnesses what she thinks is a gruesome murder—“some kind of nanotech chainsaw fantasy.“ In a depopulated London decades post-jackpot, Wilf Netherton, a disgraced publicist, is caught unawares when his latest client‘s sister disappears. The resulting investigation kicks Gibson’s discursive narrative into high gear as Flynne, allowed across time lines by use of a “peripheral“ (“an anthropomorphic drone... a telepresence avatar“), proves to be exactly the savvy, principled ally that enigmatic Det. Insp. Ainsley Lowbeer has been looking for. If the mechanics of time-travel are sometimes murky, the stakes are crystal clear when Flynne reaches out from Wilf’s past to alter her own future. All of Gibson’s characters are intensely real, and Flynne is a clever, compelling, stereotype-defying, unhesitating protagonist who makes this novel a standout. Agent: Martha Millard, Martha Millard Literary Agency.