![]() ![]() But their viewpoints operate in what an MFA student would recognize as very-close-third-person mode: we know what the viewpoint character does and thinks and no more. ![]() ![]() ![]() Flynne Bishop is living in a down-at-the-heels semi-rural USA, perhaps a decade or two from now and Wilf Netherton is a publicist operating in a much more technologically sophisticated and wealthy London. The novel is built on a pair of alternating-viewpoint threads. In fact, that craft was the first thing I noticed. While Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History were minimally science-fictional in their furniture (however much SF feeling they might have wrung out of their could-be-next-week settings), the world evoked by this new book is deliberately and progressively estranged, not only by its genre furniture (around to which we will get eventually), but by the writerly craft with which everything in the story is delivered. William Gibson’s The Peripheral offers a now-familiar blending of close-textured SF and noir/thriller modes, an evolution of the Gibson recipe that reaches back to the very beginning of his career. ![]()
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