2003’s Pattern Recognition, the first novel in the Blue Ant trilogy which went on to include Spook Country (2007) and Count Zero (2010), began to resituate the body and specifically the haptic as key to engaging with the world while The Peripheral takes this philosophical journey further, privileging the haptic as a key site of phenomenological engagement. The Sprawl trilogy and the Bridge trilogy privileged vision as the most important of the senses, particularly in cyberspace where the body is left behind and engagement with virtual reality happens mainly through the eyes gazing on a computer screen. Gibson’s work is consistently concerned with the relationship of the individual to their society and the interface between the two, as mediated through the senses. Although the project is still in the early stages of development, it could bypass Amazon’s regular pilot. The result is his most daring and genre-breaking novel since Neuromancer, which was published in 1984. Amazon is working on a TV adaptation of the 2014 William Gibson novel The Peripheral. However, in terms of its philosophical position, The Peripheral is the continuation of a career-long trajectory. The Peripheral, as many reviewers point out, is his return back to the future. Given this pattern in Gibson’s writing habits, 2014’s The Peripheral can be considered a new work, set in a separate universe from any of Gibson’s previous novels. These series – the Sprawl, the Bridge, and the Blue Ant trilogies – are set in three different time periods and are populated by characters who reappear from one book to the next. William Gibson tends to write in trilogies, as his first nine novels show.

William gibson's the peripheral