In 1982 it was the first to use the term cyberspace, a virtual place that today we take for granted and that we frequent as if it were true. Exactly forty years later, William Gibson returns with another product of his imagination destined in some way to anticipate our future.
The work in question is the novel The Peripheralreleased in 2014 and published in Italy in 2017 with the title of inverse (the reason is understood by reading it), which has become one tv series in 8 episodes produced by Amazon Studios and Warner Bros in collaboration with Kilter Films by Jonathan Nolan, brother of the more famous Christopher.
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What The Peripheral is about
Inverse is about time travel, but not how it does Back to the Future: for Gibson that would be too easy. The gift by Flynne, one of the protagonists, is the future of who reads but is also the past by Wilf, the other protagonist of the book, whose present is also Flynne’s future. As we understand, and like more or less all of GIbson’s works, too inverse it has a very high entrance threshold, due to the many characters, a not simple plot and the many words that the author invents and puts there as if they had always been there, as if there was no need to explain them. And in fact he doesn’t explain them and lets the reader make them with him, so that the first 70-100 pages (the book lasts just over 500) can be tiring at times or very tiring. And yet, as soon as you begin to understand, everything goes more or less smoothly.
Simplifying, e without spoiler, Flynne lives in a small town in the United States in (our) near future, he supports himself by playing characters in online video games or by working for a shop that prints objects in 3D, which have now become the norm. Wilf lives in a London moved 70 years ahead in time, after an unspecified catastrophe wiped out much of humanity: in his time, time travel is a kind of hobby for the rich. You do not travel physically, but using peripherals that resemble virtual reality headsets and connect to a mysterious server in China inside which the world‘s past would be stored. It is during one of these trips made with what today we would call avatars, that Flynne and Wilf meet and together have to solve a mystery: they do it in what Mondadori then called “middle ground” but that today we know to be a world reconstructed through virtual reality viewers. A metaverse (things?)to put it in a word so dear to Mark Zuckerberg.
youtube: The Peripheral trailer
The (spot on) predictions of The Peripheral
That of the metaverse, is the first, largest and most obvious prediction guessed by Inverso. That was released in 2014, when the virtual worlds were already there but they were definitely not the ones that are being built now. Not surprising, since the word metaverse was first used by a colleague of Gibson’s, writer Neal Stephenson, in the novel Snow Crashreleased in 1992.
Then there is the abundant use of artificial intelligence and robots, obviously explained by the licenses that a work of fiction is allowed to grant itself, and there is the concept of telepresenzaused multiple times to describe what Flynne and Wilf do and that we too, in the real world, use more and more often to describe actions we perform in one place, but being in another place.
Among the other details that leap to the eye when reading the book, which is really beautiful and also has a sequel (it is called Agency), it’s interesting the role given to China, which in the future is now largely autonomous from a technological point of view, has very few contacts with the West and hides “the great mystery” that “is beyond our reach”. Which is kind of what is happening nowadays and for real.
Then there are cars: private ones practically no longer exist, but there are vehicles that you rent when you need to move, printed or to be printed and made of water-repellent paper that can then be recycled. Nowadays we are not (yet?) Going towards cars built like this, but we are definitely moving more and more towards cars no longer to own but to use when needed. Maybe guided by a robot or an artificial intelligence.
In the end, the Wheelie Boy, a small automaton which in the second part of the novel has a significant role: it is half a meter tall, moves on wheels and has a screen that functions as a face (and interface). Do you remember anything? Impossible not to think of Astro, the domestic robot unveiled by Amazon at the end of 2021. And imagined by Gibson 7 years earlier.
When the series arrives on Amazon Prime Video
The Peripheral is available in streaming in more or less all over the world (including Italy) starting from 21 Octoberwith the episodes being released weekly, every Friday.
The actress Chloë Grace Moretz has the role of Flynne, while Wilf is played by Gary Carr; among other characters worthy of mention, we remember Jack Reynor as Burton (former military man, Flynne’s brother) and Julian Moore-Cook and Eli Goree who lend their faces to Ossian and Connor, respectively.
4 other books by Gibson that you cannot but read
William Gibsonborn in the USA in 1948, is one of the fathers of cyberpunk together with Bruce Sterling and it is a bit like modern science fiction Isaac Asimov is the classic one: all his production, especially that of the beginnings, should be read to understand where technology is going. Or where in the 80s we imagined it would go.
If you had to choose a single work to readit could only be The night we burned Chromewhich has nothing to do with the Google browser but is a collection of short stories published in 1986 which includes, among others, the story that gives the volume its title (written in 1982, the one in which the word cyberspace appears), The continuum of Gernsback, New Rose Hotel e Johnny Mnemonicfrom which in 1995 the homonymous film with Keanu Reeves was made.
And yet, it is impossible not to mention too the 3 novels that make up the Sprawl trilogypublished in sequence between 1984 and 1988 but today can also be purchased in a single volume: they are Neuromante, Down in cyberspace e Mona Lisa Cyberpunk and they have helped to define forever the idea of the future of the teenagers of the Eighties.
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The future predicted by William GIbson
Of the three, the most significant is obviously the first, Neuromante: not only is it considered in some way the manifesto of the cyberpunk genre, but it is also the one in which the concept of cyberspace is expanded and defined. According to Gibson it is “a hallucination experienced consensually every day by billions of operators in every nation, a graphical representation of data taken from the banks of every computer in the human system ”, made up of“ unthinkable complexity ”and“ lines of light aligned in the non-space of the mind, clusters and constellations of data ”.
Words aside, it is exactly what we would have experienced (and are experiencing) for real thanks to the arrival of the Internet and later virtual worlds, video games, simulations, however. imagined in 1982, when the Net as we know it today was just an idea in the minds of the most visionary programmers. Or the most gifted writers.
Gibson is also due the approach to popular culture of the concept of hackers, the “console cowboy” capable of connecting to the Matrix (yes, the one in the 1999 film), the global computer network that unites the world‘s computers. In his works, another recurring term is ICEacronym which stands for Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics: they are the electronic anti-intrusion countermeasures, fictionalized version of the current firewalls and antivirus, they have the same function but in the books they can also kill the most inexperienced hackers.
And then of course there are the IA is a robot like the michikoids, with porcelain skin, both sensitive and resistant, which are very reminiscent of automata imagined by Masamune Shirow in Ghost in the Shellor those addressed by Will Smith in Io, robot. And they also seem to be the perfect evolution of those with whom we increasingly have and will have to deal with every day, not only in a supermarket or in a Tokyo station. but also at the Roman airport of Fiumicino.