Yesterday evening I headed into Bath to see William Gibson at Toppings. It was a very interesting evening, and I’m certainly looking forward to reading The Peripheral. Unfortunately it is also Locus Recommended Reading List season, and as anything by Bill is going to be on the list by default I really need to think diversity and read other books first.

Still, some of you will be interested to know what The Peripheral is like, so here as a few comments. The most important thing to note is that, unlike the Blue Ant series, this book is set in the future. The real future, not an unevenly distributed present. It includes smart phone systems that are embedded in the body, and distributed rather than being a single lump of tech. The other thing I got from the reading is that it is going to be quite funny. Here are a couple of quotes:

You’re a publicist, she’s a celebrity. That’s interspecies.

She smiled, displaying teeth whose placement might well have been decided by a committee.

Bill is still clearly very much interested in PR, but he appears to be taking a lighter and more sarcastic view of the whole thing, at least from the bits of the book I heard.

There was also a Q&A session. I asked him a follow-on question from the Start the Week show he did on Tuesday. He talked about how he expected that people from around the time of The Peripheral will look back on our era with as much disgust as we look back on the Victorians. Asking him what about us might seem so disgusting in the wake of the Ferguson verdict was, of course, a no-brainer, but I asked him anyway and he gave exactly the sort of answer I was hoping for. He said that, given much of what disgusts us about the Victorians are things they were very proud of, what will disgust future humanity about our era won’t just be things like destroying the environment, it will also be some of the things that we do that we think are wonderful.

On the subject of social media, Bill said he expected it to fade away as we become more connected, presumably because we’ll always be able to check in on what each other is doing, rather than needing a platform to do so. I’m less convinced about that, because the whole point of things like Facebook is to create a walled garden that users think is the entire internet. That people buy into this, despite the far greater risks, suggests that we’ll always be prey to such marketing ploys.

Another really interesting answer he gave was in response to a question about AIs. This is what he said:

Our idea of artificial intelligence may turn out to be like the flying cars of the 1940s

Science fiction authors, please take note.

Finally, Bill was asked if The Peripheral was going to be the first book of a trilogy. He said he hoped not, and in particular he hoped that it would not become one of those works of art whose value was diminished by its sequels. Yes, he was talking about The Matrix. Sorry Lana.