The Peripheral

“The square filled with a low moaning, the island’s hallmark soundscape. The patchers had wormed hollow tubes through every structure. Wind blew across their open tops, generating a shifting, composite tonality he’d hated from the moment he’d first heard it.”

The sensory description provided here helps establish the dystopian world that is a hallmark of the cyberpunk genre.

“The Notting Hill house had been Lev’s grandfather’s first London real estate, acquired midcentury, just as the jackpot really got going.”

This is the second time in the novel that the term jackpot is used, though the reader won’t learn about the jackpot for many more chapters. As is common in the novel, the characters know something that is not obvious to the reader, which helps build suspense.

“Something she’d gotten from Burton and the Corps, that you didn’t do things in the clothes you sat around in. You got yourself squared away, then your intent did too.”

This is characterization, as the orderliness describes an aspect of Flynne’s personality. She is nobody’s fool and is not a slacker, though her nickname is “Easy Ice.”

“She remembered the SS officer, when she’d worked for Dwight. Face of the man at the window reminded her.”

This shows an example of Gibson’s narrative style, especially in the chapters that focus on Flynne’s era. The second phrase omits the article “the” before “face.” This reveals an evolving language structure in which common syntax is corrupted, presumably by mediated forms of communication such as texting.

“It altered constantly, their encryption, something sounding Spanish morphing into a faux German in the course of a simple statement, perhaps by way of something more like birdsong than speech.”

The narrator is describing the methods by which Ossian and Ash communicate privately. The need for them to encrypt their language not only excludes Netherton from understanding what they say, but it also enables them to avoid eavesdroppers like the police doing the same.

“He was watching two Lego pieces, one red, one yellow, as they morphed into two small spheres, between the Starck pepper grinder and a bowl of oranges.”

The Legos that Netherton watches here suggest that even mundane objects are animated with artificial life. This is a direct contrast with the natural life he sees later in the novel when he visits Flynne’s world in a peripheral.

“Hefty Mart had to scan your socket before they fabbed you one, so it would fit, and there weren’t any funny ones yet.”

The idiomatic expressions here come across as commonplace as if the reader is expected to just know what these terms mean. The slang here is another one of Gibson’s stylistic flourishes. Hefty Mart is a massive retailer, fabbed means to fabricate, and funny means fake.

“‘In each instance in which we interact with the stub,’ Ash said, ‘we ultimately change all of it, the long outcomes.’”

The passage shows that shows how Lev’s interactions with the stub have consequences that he either does not understand or does not care about.

“Listening to her, Netherton found he lost himself, not unpleasantly. Her accent fascinated him, a voice out of pre-jackpot America.”

Netherton has an almost immediate fondness for Flynne because she represents the lost world. Once again, the narrator mentions the jackpot without explaining what it is.

“A given interval in the stub is the same interval here, from first instant of contact. We can no more know their future than we can know our own, except to assume that it ultimately isn’t going to be history as we know it.”

Ash says this to Netherton, and it suggests that the future for Flynne has been altered. This opens the door for a possible avoidance of the jackpot happening.

“I’ve continual access to most things, resulting in a terrible habit of behaving as if I already know everyone I meet.”

Lowbeer says this and reveals that her access to information is unlimited. That she is a detective suggests that she represents a police state in which nothing is hidden.

“‘State AI. Satellite noticed the vehicle hadn’t moved for two hours. Also flagged your property for unusual drone activity.’”

Drones and satellites are used to investigate the quadruple homicide near Burton’s property. It highlights the invasiveness of police apparatus and surveillance systems of the near future.

“London’s vast quiet seemed suddenly to press in.”

The vast quiet of London contrasts sharply with the modern metropolis that it is usually regarded as. The sensory description once again hints at a dystopian setting.

“We call them that. Algorithms. We have a great many, built up over decades. I doubt anyone today knows quite how they work, in any given instance.”

That nobody knows how the algorithms work suggests that future London has crossed the singularity. The singularity is a theorized point in the future when technological growth surpasses human input, resulting in a totally changed society.

“The county’s most viable economy is the molecular synthesis of illicit drugs. The sheriff is in the pay of the most successful local synthesist.”

The economy of Flynne’s world is dependent on the drug trade. Significantly, the drugs are synthetic, calling into question whether naturally occurring drugs that come from plants have been decimated by environmental damage.

“‘Wilf,’ he said, thinking it sounded less like a name than an awkward cough.”

The novel is not without some funny moments. This one comes at the expense of Netherton’s first name, and his self-conscious reflections characterize him as an insecure person.

“People were so fantastically boring. Flynne, he thought, was the opposite of all of this, whether in her peripheral or not.”

Netherton thinks this as he watches people acting out inside peripherals. He is put off by the artifice of it all and instead recalls Flynne and how authentic she is.

“‘She sees your distaste for the present rooted in the sense of a fall from grace. That some prior order, or perhaps the lack of one, afforded a more authentic existence.’”

Lowbeer says this to Netherton. She is referring to Ash, and Ash’s diagnosis of Netherton once again highlights his unease at the world he lives in. It also hints at the original fall of Adam and Eve, suggesting that Netherton longs for a kind of Edenic existence that is unattainable for him.

“We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp.”

Lowbeer’s words to Netherton here suggest that history is simply a human mechanism for providing order against a larger backdrop that we can never fully understand.

“Though mainly in how visually banal they generally are, as opposed to the considerable glamor we all seem to imagine they had, as we remember them.”

Netherton asks Lowbeer if she can tell what Flynne is dreaming, and this is the end of the response she gives. As an outside observer, dreams are never as eventful and interesting as they are to the people who actually dream them.

“Looking back through this clumsy toy at this strange world, in which worn things weren’t meticulously distressed, but actually worn, abraded by their passage through time.”

Netherton is in his Wheelie-Boy peripheral and notices how even natural wear and tear is preferable to the artificially created distress of his world, in which human technological interference even replicates decay.

“It made her expect Pickett might walk in, and for all she knew, given the way things were going, she felt like he might.”

As events move fast and furious, Flynne has found herself unsure as to what will happen next. This unpredictability fosters a sense of the surreal where anything could happen.

“That evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness."

One of the underlying premises of the book–the philosophy presented here–suggests that ordinary human behavior without forward-thinking can lead to the same level of catastrophe as pure evil.