The timelines are linked by the two-way flow of information through the server, but they are causally separate from the point of contact onward, each proceeding into its own future.

When the server makes contact with the past, it creates an alternate timeline branch, or continuum, separate from the actual past of the twenty-second-century timeline. This server is the time machine of Gibson’s novel. Among the many advances is a mysterious computer server capable of communicating with the past. In this future, let’s call it the early twenty-second century for simplicity, technology has progressed into the vicinity of Arthur C. The second timeline unfolds seventy-some years after Flynne and Burton’s. All that’s left is an economy based on multinational big-box stores and fast-food chains, a 3D-printing industry that uses its spare capacity to make illegal drugs and black-market knock-offs of mainstream goods, and, for the few with exceptional gaming skills, like Flynne and Burton, occasional opportunities to make money as a player-for-hire in online combat games. Surely the American dream is still alive somewhere in this future, but it has long since expired for the working class. Imagine small-town America as it might be in 30 years: still working hard to make ends meet, but more rundown by a persistent lack of economic opportunity, the wealth gap more pronounced, the quality of life for everyday people going backwards even as technology races ahead. The first future, where we meet Flynne Fisher and her brother, Burton, is like now, just a little different.

The result is a heady, fast-paced, sometimes disorienting leap into not one but two possible futures. In The Peripheral (2014), William Gibson turns his prescient imagination to time travel, one of science fiction’s most shopworn tropes. The future is inside us, it’s not somewhere else.

The peripheral trilogy