Science fiction authors won’t tell you this, but they are lousy at predicting the future. I love my genre fiction, but learned long ago I get more reliable prognostications from a daily horoscope or stale fortune cookie.
Maybe we should be glad, given the dystopian flavor of so many of these genre novels. I really don’t want to live in a J.G. Ballard or Samuel Delany novel, or find myself trapped in a Philip K. Dick matrix-like construct . If I have to live inside an author’s make-believe world, I’d even take gloomy Dostoevsky over positivist H.G. Wells. I trust Raskolnikov more than Dr. Moreau .
So when it comes to forecasts, I'll settle for random passages from Virgil. Or the Edgar Cayce archives. I'll even opt for Nate Silver. Anything but sci-fi.
But I make an exception for William Gibson, who is a genuine futurist masquerading as a science fiction writer. He denies this vehemently. “Only charlatans say they really know the future,” he declares. But technologists pay close attention to his stories and utterances, and for good reason. Gibson has a better forecasting record than any of your Silicon Valley gurus or elite venture capitalists.
Some thirty-five years ago, Gibson laid out a blueprint for the digital age in his influential novel Neuromancer . This work is widely credited with introducing the concept of cyberspace. Some have even suggested that Gibson may have gone beyond predictions, and actually contributed to the evolution of the Internet: "What if the act of writing it down,” asks fellow sci-fi writer Jack Womack, “in fact, brought it about?"
It’s hard to live up to such a reputation. But Gibson has somehow managed to stay at the forefront of conceptual thinking even as history turns his previous dreams into banal reality. There’s no glamor in email or social networks nowadays, and Gibson has been forced to push ahead into the unknown—perhaps his favorite home turf. In his 2014 futurist thriller The Peripheral , he is still as provocative and edgy as ever. Even if you come to this book, like me, having read hundreds of other sci-fi stories set in the future, and think every meme and formula has been fully exploited and exhausted, Gibson will show you otherwise.
In The Peripheral , Gibson reinvigorates the most tired subgenre of them all, the time travel story. In fact, I don’t think I would have even considered reading this novel if someone had warned me it involved time travel. Been there, done that, too many times. But Gibson is so subtle and slick in this book, that you could read this entire novel without even grasping that it’s a variant on the time travel tale. Instead, Gibson latches on to the fascinating notion that the past can be reinterpreted as a kind Third World culture, lacking our technologies and up-to-date viewpoints. Even garden-variety historians can be seen as neo-colonialists exploiting previous generations for their own benefit and advancement.
But Gibson pushes this concept further. What happens if two rival powers both try to exploit the past, in a kind of sci-fi imperialist power grab? Here our author latches on to his next insight: this rivalry might resemble a kind of video game. You could even imagine a flippant game player destroying a whole past world simply out of zeal to ‘win’ the competition. One society’s recreation is another’s destruction.
Gibson has many other angles here, but none of them are obvious, even after you are well beyond the midpoint of his twisted novel. At first glance, Gibson is telling two different stories that have nothing to do with each other. In one narrative, a young woman named Flynne gets lured into playing a video game that is too eerily realistic. Without realizing it, this seemingly innocent pastime leads to an unknown enemy taking out a contract on her life—but in the real world, not the game. What did she do to set off this backlash? Even worse, her adversary seems to have almost unlimited resources and is determined at all costs to kill our protagonist. In a second narrative, an alcoholic publicist finds that his eccentric client, a performance artist in a kind of post-Marina Abramović mold, has set off an international incident after one of her projects goes awry.
I hear readers often complain that they find it difficult to figure out what is happening in William Gibson’s stories. They have a valid point. The confusion level here is off the charts, especially in the opening chapters of The Peripheral . But that isn’t a shortcoming in Gibson’s work, but a carefully calculated gambit. He wants the readers to experience the strangeness of the worlds he presents. It’s too his credit that, even after you start feeling some sense of mastery over the storylines and their intersections, he still has many surprises in store for you.
I have suggested elsewhere that too much emphasis in literary studies is placed on experimentation with language, and not enough attention is given to innovations with concepts. Reading William Gibson is the perfect corrective to this bias. But it’s worth noting how slow the literary world has been to take notice. The New York Times never even mentioned his pathbreaking novel Neuromancer until the book had been out for a full ten years! Yet with the benefit of hindsight, Gibson’s breakout book may have been the most conceptually advanced work of fiction of the 1980s.
Yet I must give Gibson credit for his writing too. Many sci-fi writers with great conceptual skills are second-rate stylists. As much as I admire Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, I would never recommend their books as role models for aspiring authors. Gibson, in contrast, is a poised writer with great control over his sentences and paragraphs. He would have never been crowned the king of cyberpunk if he hadn’t been able to capture the whole ethos of that movement in his artfully-constructed texts.
But in The Peripheral he shows, against all odds, that punks can keep their edge even in their late sixties. That’s an achievement in its own right. I’m not sure how many more great novels William Gibson has in him—unlike our esteemed author, I’m no futurist and don’t give out forecasts—but if this book is any indicator, he is still at the top of his very difficult game.
Ted Gioia writes on music, literature and popular culture. He is the author of ten books. His most recent book is How to Listen to Jazz (Basic Books).
Gibson latches on to the fascinating notion that the past can be reinterpreted as a kind Third World culture, lacking our technologies and up-to-date viewpoints.