Peripheral, The

by William Gibson (2014)

3/10

This is basically a murder mystery where not much happens and you get a really weak payoff. Sure it’s dressed up in a fairly interesting scifi/cyberpunk skin, but as far as narrative goes that’s what we’re working with.

When I say not much happens, I mean it. There are about a half-dozen action sequences, each of them occupying less than two pages. The underwhelming climax takes about 5 pages. Do the math, that’s less than 20 pages out of almost 500 where anything exciting happens. That means 4% of the book is action and 96% is foreplay: set-up, exposition, and characters preparing for the climax.

The above math equation comes out even worse when you account for the fact that about half of those action scenes occur in the first 100 pages of the book, when I still had no idea what was going on. They were incomprehensible even after multiple readings. Gibson’s world-building is impressive — I definitely believe he has thought all of this through to an admirable extent — but the way he explains it to the reader is severely lacking.

There’s so much jargon and weird technology and he doesn’t explain any of it for hundreds of pages, so you’re just flailing as a reader for the first fifth of the book. Then you finally get the hang of it about halfway through, but at that point you have 200 pages to wait through before anything else happens. Gibson’s choice to limit the narrative to the perspectives of two characters also cuts out a significant portion of the action (which is perpetrated by two other, frankly more interesting characters).

It’s also baffling to me how mundane the climax is, and Gibson’s neglect at explaining his time-travel mechanism, which he mysteriously hints has to do with China. Sure seems like 500 pages would have been enough space to explore that larger and much more compelling issue, rather than honing in on a quotidian assassination.

Anyway, I’ll stop. I went back and read my Neuromancer review and it turns out I felt very similarly about that book. At the time I gave Gibson the benefit of the doubt and assumed he was just too smart for me, but after this one I kinda doubt it.