The Peripheral - William Gibson's future London from Amazon

From the mind bending creators of westworld. Oh and William Gibson, too.

The Peripheral is an amazing $&^%n wailing guitar solo of a novel, and Agency is uncomfortable and memorable, too. @greatdismal is an absolute unit and hero; it’s hard to believe he is still writing. I love what he does.

…I’m probably not going to like this show… :-/

for the simple reason that Gibson’s words always seem to say so much more than could ever be transcribed to screen. The man is a poet who has found his medium; Neuromancer I had to read several times before I ‘got’ what was going on… but an a screen… it’s all right there. This version of the Matrix (and not something else), this color of television, this deck, this rig, this math grenade…

…it’s just not the same.

The experience of seeing “Neuromancer”, for example, would almost have to be something entirely unrelated to it… like an experimental film that doesn’t follow a conventional plot.

Will I watch the show? Yes, absolutely… but the novel has already spoiled it, for me, it seems.

On second thought, maybe I won’t watch it… just because I… don’t want to see someone get taken apart by a nanite cloud in any way other than I’ve already imagined it; I don’t want to see another Fabbit. The characters, how they relate, the setting (pretty good job on this from the trailer), the tattoos, the titular peripheral… they are already there in my mind, and I’m not sure I want to start a new stub with them in it.

Oct 21st as the OP neglected to post the important info :)

director Vincenzo Natali

Okay, now I’m interested.

Oh wow, yea bury another lede. He was supposed to do Neuromancer at one point if I remember correctly. Yea, I’ll watch it.

Edit: I gonna take another opportunity to express how much I dislike this kind of movie and show trailer editing. It’s all so infantalizing.

So this comes out today. It looks promising.

I was not interested until I saw a preview on Thursday Night Football last night that showed these flashes of images, like a city with giant men you can see in the distance. Very evocative imagery. Now I want to see it.

I saw the first two episodes; it changes some of the narrative structure, but the plot is basically the same.

Aaand? You cant just say you saw it - Spill the proverbial beans, man! Spill’em!

I read that Starflightdream saw the first two episodes.

So far this is pretty good! There’s definitely some things that could be improved(after watching Andor, hearing the way exposition is used in this makes it seem kind of clunky), but I’m giong to stick with it, if only because I’m a pretty big fan of Gibson.

As of right now, it’s hard to know what the show is about, which might look funny because it’s obviously about The Peripheral, right? It’s enjoyable, so far.

It’s been a while since I’ve read the novel, but I think parts have been “Hollywoodized” like the gun battle which looked more like something I recall from Stephenson’s “Reamde”, or that the scorpion end of the tricycle was replaced with a bullpup rifle.

Somehow I had in my head when reading the book that Flynn was… elderly? Here, she is young. I don’t remember if there was anything that gave it away one way or another in the novel, it was more simply from how her character was described and how she interacted with the world. When describing her peripheral, for a moment I wondered if they were going to have her character say “prettier and tittier”.

Some of the things from the show that stretched my suspension of disbelief were different from the novel - that no one noticed the gun battle taking place… or how… non-escalatory Flynn’s police officer love interest is? Like, after seeing a coffee cup floating on top of an invisible car (also not in the book, although there are “squid suits”)?

I recall the sequence with the mercenaries being one in which Flynn is kidnapped, and it’s more of a ‘precision strike’… both ways, coming in the last third of the book. These probably don’t translate all that well or else don’t make as engaging a viewing experience as they do reading. The “haptic recon”, homebrew army bit was also in the book, but the way I recall it being described was much more believable. That stated, it was a very fun sequence to watch. It just… didn’t really stand up to logic the way I remember in the book.

It’s funny how you can have the same story, but in the way it’s told say two different things. That’s what I mean when I write it remains to be seen what the show is about.

I’m still down for the ride.

Are those spoilers for the first two episodes or for the story beyond?

The last spoilered paragraph is for the story beyond

It is strong, quite good so far.

First episode is solid.

Is this dropping an episode each week? I’m gonna wanna binge it, and see if I can convince my wife to watch too.

A lot of interesting little nuances in this show… Like near the end of the second episode, with picket in VR, things are lower resolution than the real world… Not by much, but a little bit that makes things look a tiny bit fake.

Some of the dialogue could be better — there are a lot of unnecessary lines, and just as many predictable ones — but visually the show is terrific, and I like all the major character actors. The plot seems to be following the novel closely enough (it’s been years since I read it). I do think they’re bailing out the uninitiated audience a bit by revealing the underlying premise early, but probably they have to do that because of the demands of episodic television designed for a wide audience vs a very dense and often deliberately confusing novel.