Gibson’s latest science-fiction novel uncovers the future
“The Peripheral” by William Gibson (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 486 pages, $28.95)
In a dead-end American town, a young woman named Flynne fills in for her brother, beta-testing an online game that seems to involve fending off paparazzi in some futuristic London skyscraper. When she witnesses a murder, she decides maybe it’s not a game after all – a fact confirmed when gunmen hired by forces from the 22nd century show up to kill her and her family.
Although it veers back and forth between near-future and further on, “The Peripheral,” science-fiction master William Gibson’s first novel in four years, is not really a time-travel story. It’s a story of people making choices, and how those choices can ripple through time, or spiral out of control.
In Flynne’s world, dominated by giant corporations, soaring health care costs and soldiers from unnamed wars putting their lives back together, most folks are just hanging on. Drones are commonplace, and so are corruption, 3-D-printed weaponry, illegal pharmaceuticals and the cynical use of power. Flynne and other decent people survive by keeping their heads down and consciences clear.
The future-world that Flynne gets a glimpse of is dominated by kleptocracy, Machiavellian plotting, frantic innovation and an alarming disregard for consequence. When the murder she witnesses brings the killers into her timeline, a rival faction from the future steps in to protect her – and, in the process, changes the present in a way that severs its relationship to the future.
Flynne’s principal connection to that future is Wilf Netherton, a publicist whose brief affair with a client is tangled up in what Flynne witnessed. They connect not by physically traveling through time, but through “peripherals”: drones inhabited virtual-reality-style that allow them to experience and communicate in the other reality without leaving their own.
To bring matters to a head, Flynne must “travel” to Wilf’s world and identify the murderer. But getting her there alive will require more than technical cunning on both sides of the looking glass.
More than in any of his past novels, the future in “The Peripheral” is a moving target – and, as he makes a good case, regular people can move it to a better destination.
Chris Foran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“The Hilltop: A Novel” by Assaf Gavron, translated from the Hebrew by Steven Cohen (Scribner, 448 pages, $26)
A sprawling novel that revolves around a small settlement in the occupied territories, the focus of “The Hilltop” is less satirical than absurdist, offering a middle vision between the ridiculous and the sublime.
“In the beginning were the fields,” Gavron starts things off, and the biblical rhythms are no accident. For Othniel Assis and his fellow settler Hilik Yisraeli, their community is no less than a birthright, a connection to geography, to history, that stands outside government or politics.
It doesn’t hurt that Israel’s bureaucracy is so labyrinthine that one department doesn’t know what the next is doing.
Here, Gavron sets up the essential push-and-pull of the novel: The settlers may have laid claim illegally to their enclosure, but it is almost impossible to get them out. To make that explicit, he introduces characters on every side of the situation, including Othniel and Hilik and their families, a section commander of the Israeli Defense Forces and the residents of the neighboring Palestinian village of Kharmish.
Gavron describes all this with a measured matter-of-factness, complicating the tensions with familiarity. In this world, then, Arabs are not the other but rather uneasy neighbors who share many of the same hopes and dreams.
When the IDF decides to build a security fence that will encroach on both the settlement and the village’s olive fields, Jews and Palestinians alike protest the move. “The incident climaxed in a bizarre act of solidarity,” Gavron writes in the voice of a Washington Post reporter whom he places at the scene.
The olive groves are the source of a key subplot: a proposed partnership between one of the settlers, a former investment banker named Roni, and the Palestinian, Musa, who owns the fields. Roni has a scheme to sell Musa’s olive oil to boutiques in Tel Aviv, but when he goes to close the deal, he is outsmarted.
For Gavron, that highlights the way nothing (or no one) is isolated anymore. Investment bankers may become Israeli settlers; Palestinian villagers have lawyers in the family.
This is not to say that Gavron overlooks the politics, just that he puts them in their place. Politics, after all, begins with people’s hopes and fears. And yet the pleasure of “The Hilltop” is that it doesn’t offer easy outcomes – the only option is to persevere.
David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
This story was originally published November 29, 2014 at 6:15 PM with the headline "Gibson’s latest science-fiction novel uncovers the future."