The other world of the novel is a desolate London, further into the future after a hazily described apocalypse known as “the Jackpot” has wiped out 80% of the population. And playing video games is, for lots of people, a proper job. Most of what you need you either buy at Hefty Mart or get “fabbed” at a 3D-print shop (which is where our heroine, Flynne, works). “Homes” (aka Homeland Security) is the main power in the land. The only real money in the economy comes from “building” (a perfect Gibsonian tweak) drugs. There are wounded veterans from foreign wars. We are in a smallish town in the US, where everything is more or less like it is now, only more so. The future containing Hefty Mart is just about shouting distance from our own. In this book, there are two futures to be deciphered and I should warn fans for whom the deciphering from scratch is going to be a prime pleasure that the paragraphs which follow contain some spoilers with regards to the set-up. The reader’s work is hard at first but richly satisfying. It makes them both plausible and pleasurably strange. What she sees, though, isn't what Burton told her to expect.One of the great pleasures of Gibson’s fiction – though he is canny enough to include periodic expository info-dumps to help the confused catch up – is that sense of not being spoon-fed: his futures convince because the reader arrives in them as a tourist and learns their languages by immersion. He's offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. He's supposed to get in their way, edge them back.

The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there's a job he's supposed to do-a job Flynne didn't know he had. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. 'William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010's New York Times-bestselling Zero History. Depending on her veteran brother's benefits in a city where jobs outside the drug trade are rare, Flynne assists her brother's latest beta-test tech assignment only to uncover an elaborate murder scheme

The Peripheral by William Gibson