The Peripheral Return Of The King

William Gibson is back with his first future- set novel in 15 years

After pioneering the Cyberpunk

genre with 1984 classic Neuromancer, it appeared that William Gibson had left futuristic sci- fi behind him with the contemporary locales of his recent Blue Ant trilogy. But now the influential author is returning to future fiction with a vengeance. “Well, it was definitely time,” he tells Red Alert. “The last time I attempted an imagined future was 1999, so I hadn’t actually done it in the 21st Century.”

The Peripheral represents Gibson’s first foray into the often- tricksy territory of time travel. But although the two main characters connect across separate time periods, there’s no TARDIS here. “It isn’t possible to time travel in the universe of the book, or if it is it hasn’t been perfected yet,” explains Gibson. “But someone – we never learn who – has developed some sort of server that is able to send and receive digital information to and from the past. Except that each time someone does it for the first time, they create an individual continuum that is headed away from their particular present, which wonderfully frees the author from all the customary time travel paradoxes!”

The characters inhabit Peripherals, automaton- esque drones inspired by Bruce Sterling and Louis Shiner’s 1985 short story “Mozart in Mirror Shades”. “It has the same concept, which is if you go to the past, it’s not your past, it’s someone else’s past,” says Gibson. “Since I first read it, it’s been one of my favourite time travel stories but I didn’t want to do it physically like they do. So I separately arrived at the two bits that make time travel function and then put them together.”

Although his previous nine books have inadvertently formed a trio of trilogies, Gibson insists that there won’t be a follow- up to The Peripheral. “Because there’s the overt possibility of a multiverse going on, with any direct sequels the danger of real and serious genre cheesiness gets stronger,” he laughs. “But regardless of what I write next, readers will be constantly wondering if they’re reading about another stub of the continuum from The Peripheral, so how would we know?”