SCI-FI ENTERTAINMENT THE PERIPHERAL LIVE VIRTUAL, MOVE ACTUAL

by Keith ‘Doc’ Raymond

The Peripheral is a television series which premiered on Amazon Prime on October 21, 2022. The series, inspired by William Gibson’s book of the same name, will follow the Jackpot trilogy, with the third book yet to be released. Undoubtedly, it is the best science fiction television series to date. Intelligent and disorienting, we follow the adventures of Flynn Fisher and her brother Burton.

They jump between their present in 2032 to a future ‘stub’ set in 2170, between North Carolina and London, respectively. In the future, Flynn, Burton, and others appear virtually, implanted into and occupying robotic body known as Peripherals. Their sponsor is Lev Zubov, a wealthy Russian. This diverges widely from the book as Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer organizes the Peripherals they occupy.

In both the book and the television series, the primary thrust is the same, to discover the location of Aelita whose disappearance is because of interesting circumstances. In the book, Aelita West is the sister of Daedra West, an artist/celebrity/diplomat working for the Milagros corporation to establish relations with the ‘Patchers.’ The Patchers live on the huge garbage patch in the Pacific ocean (it exists in reality, by the way), but those that live there suffer deformities from the toxins. Wilf runs drone security when Aelita goes missing. In the TV series, Aelita is Wilf Netherton’s sis- ter, who has stolen mind control tech from Cherise Nuland, CEO of RI, an organization that builds peripherals. The differences don’t end there, though. In the book Flynn is black, in the TV series, Flynn is white, played brilliantly by Chloë Grace Moretz. While Wilf Netherton in the book is white, and in the television series is black (played by Gary Carr). Their personal qualities, however, are similar, if not equivalent, in both book and series.

In the series's present, 2032, in North Carolina, the story takes off after Burton receives a game SIM from Columbia. He insists Flynn try it. Flynn, using the SIM, enters a peripheral in the future stub, set in 2170 London, that looks like Burton. The stub is a timeline branch created by influencing past events in the future. Flynn as Burton, in the peripheral, helps Aelita steal the mind control tech from RI, angering Cherise Nuland (played by the beautiful T’Nia Miller). Cherise then hires bounty hunters in her past, the Fishers present, to take them out. Here’s where it gets even cooler: they dishonorably discharged Burton and his crew from the Marines, but the group still all possess an advanced technology known as haptics (communication through touch) allowing them to operate as a single fighting unit through a connection via neural implants. The military installed the haptics after selecting recruits from the same town because of their familiarity and ability to fight together. The haptics not only allow remote communication, but both an empathic connection and an ability to operate each other's muscles remotely when needed in battle. One member of the team detects Cherise’s bounty

Cherise armed the bounty hunters with advanced military tech, but Burton Fisher and his unit still defeats them because of their haptic augmentation. This puts the family, Burton, Flynn, their mother, and the unit on alert for other attacks. They also have to contend with Corbell, the local rich guy that essentially owns the town, who wants to control them, while they move back and forth to the future as both Lev Zubov and Detective Inspector Lowbeer use them for their own purposes.

While up in the future, all stubs have one thing in common: the Jackpot. Hence, the name of the trilogy and possibly the name of the last book in Gibson’s trilogy. The Jackpot occurs in the 2040s. It is a trifecta of global financial collapse, pandemic and world war all at the same time. It reduces the world population from billions to thousands.

The series provides a wonderful glimpse of it in an outdoor museum. On activation, an exhibit plummets Wilf and Flynn into a virtual reality display of the history of the Jackpot. The Jackpot could very well be humanity’s outcome in reality, based on a theory astrobiologists are now calling the Great Filter. The Great Filter states that all advanced civilizations will die out by their own hand, which is why the Earth has not encountered advanced alien societies to date. They just self annihilated before first contact.

Remember, this is simply the dual complex worlds these characters are living in. Also know, the television series is far easier to comprehend than the novels. Gibson intentionally, or not, gives the reader the uneasy feeling you experience when attempting to decipher the story’s cryptography, similar to what the characters experience as they move through the plot. The reader, like the characters, not only has to understand their predicament, but to survive and even triumph within the circumstances they find themselves. Fortunately, the reader is not at risk, like the characters. Or are they?

Scott Smith is the creator and executive producer of The Peripheral TV series. In April 2018, he recruited Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, the creators of the TV series Westworld, to take it from script to series. Amazon Studios accepted the series for development a year later. Joy and Nolan brought in Athena Wickham, Steve Hoban, and Vincenzo Natali. Natali directed the pilot. Warner

Brothers co-financed and produced the series with Amazon.

They began casting in October 2020, first with Chloë, then Gary, as Flynn and Wilf, respectively. The rest of the cast followed over the next year and shooting began in July 2021. I suspect, based on its popularity, we will see at least two more seasons of the show. Gibson evaluated The Peripheral TV series favorably, but I suspect he had a gun to his back when he said it.

William Gibson, himself, is a bit of a recluse. He shies away from the cameras and interviews even more so than Neal Stephenson does. Gibson is probably the original cyberpunk, coining not only the name of the genre but also naming the reality within the Internet, cyberspace. He would humbly say, though, it was a collaborative effort with other writers and cyberpunks, including Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Lewis Shiner, and Rudy Rucker.

Those writers formed the core of the radical literary movement. Cyberpunk was best delineated in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, which included Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive. In Neuromancer, Gibson coined the term the matrix, and we know what that led to! Besides cy- berspace, Gibson popularized terms such as net surfing, ICE (firewalls), jacking in, and neural implants.

In 1986, Gibson released a series of short stories in an anthology called Burning Chrome. Many of those stories predated the Sprawl trilogy, but gave him the grist for it. One of the short stories in that anthology, Johnny Mnemonic (1981), they made into a movie in 1995, of the same name, starring Keanu Reeves and featuring Ice T. The film helped focus even more attention on his books.

I read Neuromancer first in the 80s, and it completely bowled me over. In fact, I needed a break from reading the other books immediately, as I needed to digest what I just read. Plus, I wanted to savor and save the other treats for later. It opened up a whole new dimension of science fiction for me. Still, I returned to them. They are intelligent and intriguing novels.

Not satisfied with cyberpunk, Gibson collaborated with Bruce Sterling after Mona Lisa Overdrive. This led to the creation of another sub-genre in their book The Difference Engine. Set during the Victorian era, they created steampunk. Steampunk is science fiction that has a historical setting and typically features steam-powered machinery rather than advanced technology.

Beyond the Jackpot trilogy, his other trilogies include the Bridge trilogy, set in Japan, and best typified by Idoru, and the Blue Ant trilogy, which is about the antihero Hubertus Bigend, who first appears in Pattern Recognition. Most of William Gibson’s books are short but incredibly dense. They are not uncomplicated reads, but well worth the effort.

If you think you can skip the book

The Peripheral because you saw the series, think again. Both are phenomenal and addictive. Jack in and find out!