I just finished reading William Gibson’s The Peripheral (Powells, Amazon) yesterday. It’s his best for some time; maybe, depending on your druthers, the best novel that he’s ever written. It doesn’t have the shock value of Neuromancer (which blew my mind when I read it at the age of fifteen, in a small provincial town in Ireland). However, it’s a much better novel. The Sprawl books are all opaque and dazzling mirrorshades – the surfaces of high-gloss people reflecting the surfaces of high-gloss objects that reflect the surfaces of high-gloss people. The not-quite-science-fiction novels he was writing for a while take the givens of the Sprawl books as a problem, engaging in a kind of archeology of objects and brand names, and how they reflect both the vast systems around us and our individual desires. I like them (they combine the intelligence of Don DeLillo with much of the warmth of Philip K. Dick), but I like his short book of essays, Distrust That Particular Flavor even better (it’s a book full of insights, which, like Borges’ version of Kafka, generates its own predecessors). The Peripheral returns to science fiction – but a science fiction that very clearly reflects present day concerns.