Johnny Mnemonic in Black and White - Robert Longo, William Gibson, and Keanu Reeves talk about JM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7-SzWZNiBg

#Cyberpunk #JohnnyMnemonic #williamgibson

I just finished reading William Gibson - The Peripheral.

I had watched the TV show, but the book is very different. It's very Gibson though.. a clash of monolithic shadowy power structures whose actions are narrated to us by the innocent pawns conscripted into the war.

And a happy ending where a closed negative reality is replaced with an open unknown future but in a way that is more a regime change than a radical revolution.

Also it's very much a fairy story.

#WilliamGibson

Quemando Cromo – William Gibson (1986)

https://fsolt.es/2025/04/quemando-cromo-william-gibson-1986/

I read a news item about Amazon's TV adaptation of William Gibson's novel THE PERIPHERAL, and thought the idea sounded intriguing. The show got cancelled after a single season, so there's no point in watching it now -- I read the book instead.

In the book, protagonist Flynne Fisher lives in an economically-depressed rural area in a near-future US, with her mom Ella and her ex-military brother Burton. Burton is doing odd jobs, one of which is supposedly beta-testing a new VR game.

He lets Flynne sub for him in the game, where she's operating a drone in a futuristic city and during this, she witnesses an apparent murder. But it's not actually a game: the people of 70 years in the future, who live in a world of bioengineering and 3D-printed bodies, are using an unspecified mechanism to communicate with the past and outsource some tasks, like drone operation, to people in the past.

Now someone in the future would like to eliminate Flynne as a potential witness, and it turns into a proxy battle as the future people, with publicist Wilf Netherton as our POV character, begin manipulating the global economy of Flynne's time. To help with the investigation, Flynne dials into the future in a teleoperated body that's called a peripheral, giving the book its title.

Lots of clever ideas here, and Gibson's prose is excellent. Each chapter alternates between Flynne's familiar and increasingly risky world, and Wilf's exotic and unfamiliar one. Somewhere between Flynne and Wilf, there was a polycrisis event called the Jackpot that's an unspecified mix of climate change, technological disaster and political crisis that killed off 80% of humanity.

(Ha ha, those sci-fi writers with their whimsical escapist fantasies!)

Overall I liked the book, but it left me unsatisfied. Spoilers in the next post... (1/2)

#WilliamGibson #ThePeripheral #sf #mystery #books #bookstodon

Good overview of Torment Nexus concept. In the end, sci-fi doesn’t teach people to be evil. It simply amplifies today’s evil with tomorrow’s technology.

@books @bookstodon @religion #ChristianSciFi #ProfessorK #tormentnexus #sciencefiction #AI #space #amwritingsf #secretscifinetwork #neilstephenson #isaacasimov #matrix #robertheinlein #williamgibson #philipkdick #cyberpunk #bladerunner #dystopian #musk #thiel

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/apr/14/the-big-idea-will-sci-fi-end-up-destroying-the-world?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1