This is a post-apocalyptic (or more accurately, during-apocalyptic) cyberpunk novel, which focuses so much on humanity that as a reader, I almost stopped seeing the cyberpunk altogether. It’s almost the opposite of William Gibson type novels, in which the humans are cyphers and the tech is cool; Miller’s humans’ emotions are deep and raw, and the fact that they live in a futuristic city run by mysterious AIs is just another part of their daily lives (though it’s also a huge part of the story). The geothermal city of Qaanaaq, an arctic refuge for those escaping the wars and chaos of a warming world, is visited by a mysterious woman who may or may not be bonded to an orca through exotic and secret technology; meanwhile, ordinary citizens are afflicted by a disease called “the breaks,” which bombard them with glimpses of strangers’ lives. Miller weaves these disparate threads together in a fast-moving and urgent story that also becomes a commentary on how those in political or economic power can dehumanize others, and the importance of family and community in a world being torn apart by climate change.
Tag: genre-cyberpunk
The Peripheral, by William Gibson
I felt like half the book had gone by before I had an idea of what was really going on (and then I realized it was more like a quarter of the book because this was actually really long for a Gibson book) because Gibson doesn’t explain anything, and his characters don’t really pause to examine why they’re doing what they’re doing (and some of them are really weird). You eventually figure out that the people from the present world (a postapocalyptic climate future, for us) have reached back to their past and opened a line of communication, thus affecting events and splitting off an alternate timeline, except all this is done via electronic communications so it’s almost like both sides are playing video games with real people. (For a bit I thought that was actually the case near the beginning, that some of them were AI. It’s not a friendly start.) I got into it eventually, particularly liking the interactions between the two main narrators, but overall I found this jumpy and more confusing than it needed to be.