CHAPTER 2 . . . KYLIE KORSNACK

NO FUTURE BUT THE ALTERNATIVE

OR, TEMPORAL LEVELING IN THE WORK OF WILLIAM GIBSON

Today, just as yesterday, the tension of living in several times at once remains unsolved.—Jacques Rancière ¹

Halfway through William Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition , the protagonist, a New Yorker named Cayce, reflects on the early days after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center towers. She recalls sitting on a bench in Union Square, surrounded by the burning candles of newly erected monuments to the dead and the missing: “She remembered sitting there, prior to her tears, looking from the monument that was still taking shape at the base of Washington’s statue to that odd sculpture across Fourteenth Street, in front of the Virgin Megastore, a huge stationary metronome, constantly issuing steam, and back again to the organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages, as though the answer, if there was one, lay in somehow understanding the juxtaposition of the two.” ² Whereas Gibson offers a thorough description of the emerging, memorial art forms taking shape in Union Square, the “odd sculpture” across the street is suspiciously understated, especially considering it is “one of the largest private commissions of public art in New York’s history.” ³ Designed by Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel, Metronome was installed in 1999 on a building that stands just south of Union Square. Composed of eight separate elements with names like “the vortex,” “the infinity,” “the passage,” and “the phases,” Metronome presents an overwhelming array of temporal signifiers. The artists describe the work as “an investigation into the nature of time” that “references the multiple measures of time that simultaneously inform and confound our consciousness of the moment.” ⁴ Metronome also serves a functional purpose. In a review, artist and critic Robert C. Morgan commented: “It is questionable whether Metronome is less pragmatic than other utilitarian aspects of the building. After all, it does tell the time. Not only does it give the exact time of day in the most literal sense, it also extends the concept of time into geology and astronomy; in essence, it projects time from what is literal to that which is metaphysical—time beyond measure.” ⁵ In this sense, Morgan’s review seems to align with the artists’ hopes for the project as a catalyst for temporal rumination, inviting viewers to contemplate, “geological, solar, lunar, daily, hourly, and momentarily, revealing the factions of seconds in the life of a city—and of a human being.” ⁶ What neither of these perspectives takes into account is the fact that this “public art wall” adorns the outside of a building owned by the private company that funded its construction. What lies within that building? A luxury apartment complex with a website that proudly invites prospective residents to “Live Luxuriously in a Work of Art.” ⁷

I begin with this somewhat indulgent elaboration on a single reference in Pattern Recognition because it captures a fundamental predicament that haunts Gibson’s fiction. On one hand, Metronome embodies the utopic ideal of the possibilities and potential of art. In full display, accessible to all, Metronome demonstrates art’s intervention into a labor-driven culture of postmodernity. The piece disrupts the fast-paced, forward-moving bustle of city life while simultaneously inviting viewers—free of charge—to slow down and contemplate those measures of temporal experience that exist beyond the dominating logic of the second hand. In its dual status as artwork and art wall, as an aesthetic intervention and a commodified aesthetic form, Metronome epitomizes the particular struggle faced by the artwork in the culture of late capitalism. In contrast to the “organic accretion of candles, flowers, photographs, and messages” of Gibson’s memorial art forms, this commissioned work seems too permanent, too curated, too reproducible. Indeed, it is precisely the ephemerality of the memorials that seem to distinguish them from that “odd sculpture” across the way. This juxtaposition highlights a central thread that exists throughout Gibson’s work: a sustained reflection on the relationship between art, temporality, and human experience in contemporary culture.

In this chapter, I trace Gibson’s long engagement with the concept of temporal multiplicity to highlight the importance of the framework to his narrative thinking. Across his work, we can identify a variety of narrative approaches that foreground his interest in temporality. Whether in the form of alternative history (The Difference Engine ), psychological movement through time (“The Gernsback Continuum”), multiverse (The Peripheral ), or machine-powered time travel (Archangel ), it is often through overlapping or multiple timelines that Gibson explores the relationship between art, aesthetics, and culture. Although it might seem too obvious to suggest that time is important to Gibson’s aesthetic, I want to explore the possibility that there is something very particular about how Gibson thinks about, represents, and problematizes temporal experience, especially in his most recent fictional works. With his 2014 novel The Peripheral , the comic book series Archangel (2016), and Agency (2020), Gibson’s fiction, perhaps more explicitly than ever before, foregrounds multiple simultaneous registers of time. To borrow a question from Fredric Jameson: “Has the author of Neuromancer ‘changed his style’?” ⁸ Not exactly. Although questions of temporal multiplicity have infused his work from the beginning, in his most recent work, Gibson’s emphasis on temporal simultaneity has stretched beyond the content of his work, infiltrating its very form.

Important to my reading of Gibson’s work are several theoretical paradigms that link the concept of simultaneity to the temporal experience of modernity. In the introduction to Time: A Vocabulary of the Present , Joel Burges and Amy J. Elias identify multiplicity and simultaneity as dominant terms defining “our sense of the present.” ⁹ As they put it:

Over the course of modernity, and with continued momentum in our time, the present has emerged as an experience of simultaneity in which temporalities multiply because they are synchronized as simultaneous on economic, cultural, technological, ecological, and planetary registers. Thus while simultaneity is often understood as a reduction of that multiplicity, creating a singular time beholden to capital, the present is actually animated by a tension between the simultaneous and the multiple, variously contracting and protracting a sense of contemporaneity in which times conjoin. ¹⁰

For Burges and Elias, the postwar present can best be described as an “experience of simultaneity,” an occurrence that captures and resists the dominating temporal logic of contemporary capitalism. In their view, capitalist contemporaneity constructs the illusion of simultaneity, a singular notion of time that aligns itself with the demands of an accelerating and expanding global market. This “illusion of simultaneity” resembles what French philosopher Jacques Rancière has referred to as the “time of domination.” In the opening lecture of a 2011 conference on “The State of Things,” Rancière posits:

There is a dominant form of temporality, for sure, a “normal” time that is the time of domination. Domination gives it its divisions and its rhythms, its agendas and its schedules in the short and long run: time of work, leisure, and unemployment; electoral campaigns, degree courses, etc. It tends to homogenize all forms of temporality under its control, defining thereby what the present of our world consists of, which futures are possible, and which definitely belong to the past—thereby indicating the impossible. ¹¹

Like Burges and Elias’s theorization of simultaneity, Rancière categorizes modern experiences of temporality as conditioned by a single, dominating temporal structure. The “time of domination” captures the consensual and forced ways that social and economic structures support the illusion of homogeneous time, a force that controls and governs how individuals, societies, and global markets move through and experience temporality in contemporary culture. In actuality, modern temporality functions “according to the regulation of the convergence and divergence of times.” ¹² In other words, simultaneous or homogenized time is a fiction produced by the logic of capitalism.

Interestingly, Burges and Elias’s insistence on the illusionary quality of capitalist temporality and Rancière’s attention to the fictionality of homogeneous time create a vision filled with space and potential for cultural resistance. For Burges and Elias, capitalism’s contemporaneity captures an experience where multiple temporalities are synchronized according to a variety of temporal registers. Rather than work in service to postmodern culture, this synchronicity creates a tension, a contradiction that by its very existence threatens to disrupt capitalism’s insistence on a singular notion of contemporaneity. In other words, the antidote to capitalist contemporaneity is breaking apart the illusion of simultaneity by exposing the multiple and simultaneous forms of temporality that structure the present.

Rancière identifies other forms of temporality—what he calls intervals and interruptions—that exist in and threaten to disrupt the dominating logic of homogeneous time. “[A] way out of that logic,” he writes, “should be a way out of its time.” ¹³ Whereas intervals capture moments when individuals or groups of people “renegotiate the ways in which they adjust their own time to the divisions and rhythms of domination,” interruptions are “moments when one of the social machines that structure the time of domination break down and stop.” ¹⁴ In both cases, the fictionality of homogeneous time is exposed, making visible the actual existence of multiple and competing forms of temporality. Thus, for Rancière, this proliferation of competing temporalities creates disruptive potential.

With this theoretical background in mind, we can begin to explore the multiple and simultaneous temporalities that categorize much of Gibson’s fiction. As we will see, although there are traces of temporal multiplicity throughout Gibson’s oeuvre, his more recent work reconfigures the novel form, disrupting its tendency toward progression and linearity in favor of simultaneity. With this shift from content to form—especially in The Peripheral —Gibson crafts an artistic form capable of interrupting the so-called time of domination or illusion of contemporaneity that categorizes the temporal experience of the postwar present.

Traveling through Time with Gibson

Often credited with helping establish the foundations for cyberpunk and steampunk, Gibson’s work has routinely framed the conventions for new subgenres of science fiction or pushed past previously established parameters to propel science fiction forward and in new directions. Although Gibson’s turn to simultaneity may seem new, his interest in alternative temporalities has spanned the majority of his literary career, and he even cites H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine as providing his first exposure to and subsequent interest in science fiction. ¹⁵ It may not come as a surprise to discover that throughout the nonfiction collection Distrust That Particular Flavor , watches, clocks, and time machines routinely inhabit Gibson’s reflections on his life and work. From his early exposure to Wells to his brief fascination with mechanical watches and his often-quoted speculation that “the end-point of human culture may well be a single moment of effectively endless duration, an infinite digital now,” Gibson has been consistently drawn to literature, commodities, and theorizations that consider how humans understand, experience, and narrate the temporal quality of living in the present. ¹⁶

This temporal thinking extends to how Gibson understands his own aesthetic. Buried within a parenthetical of the essay “Dead Man Sings,” Gibson describes the “central driving tension” of his work as a “perpetual toggling between nothing being new . . . and everything having recently changed.” ¹⁷ Here, he identifies a temporal tension in his writing between an ever sameness of the now and a rapid acceleration into the future; such tension manifests even in his reflections on the first time he tried to create a new world with his writing. Of that initial attempt at narrative creation, Gibson recalls: “I began to imag[ine] that the deserted (recently deserted?) office building in which Graham/Bannister reviewed film had in its atrium a fountain, and in this fountain, submerged, along with the usual coins, were dozens of wristwatches, some of them very expensive. Time had ended, perhaps, or the awareness of its passage had become somehow undesirable. And that was as far as I went.” ¹⁸ This unresolved confrontation between an indeterminate protagonist and a vision of submerged wristwatches could be read specifically in terms of stalled technological development or a lapse in historical progress; however, we might also consider it a general statement on the unstable, ungraspable quality of temporality. Even more significant, this early scene—Gibson’s first fictional attempt to capture and explore a person’s relationship to temporal experience—haunts much of what would become his most well-known fictional works.

Gibson’s first two novelistic trilogies—the so-called Sprawl trilogy in the 1980s and the Bridge trilogy in the 1990s—imagine futuristic settings that are chronotopic visions in the Bakhtinian sense. Recall that for Bakhtin, literary chronotopes are often places—the road, the castle, the salon—infused with temporal meaning. Time becomes visible in these settings because they are sites of encounter or structures that preserve the past and represent it in the future. ¹⁹ In Bakhtin’s vision of the chronotope, spatial and temporal categories fuse together into “one carefully thought-out concrete whole.” ²⁰ Such a collapse of time and space can be seen in the prominent sites of Gibson’s early fiction. For example, return to that well-known description of cyberspace from Neuromancer (1984): “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts. . . . A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding.” ²¹ For Gibson, cyberspace is an immaterial place, a “nonspace,” yet it is nevertheless a central point of meeting, encounter, and therefore temporal multiplicity. It is a virtual version of Bahktin’s road, where “the spatial and temporal paths of the most varied people—representatives of all social classes, estates, religions, nationalities, ages—intersect at one spatial and temporal point . . . a point of new departures and a place for events to find their denouement.” ²² As a virtual chronotope, Gibson’s cyberspace serves as “an organizing center” for the narrative as a whole.

When compared with the main site of encounter within Gibson’s second trilogy—the Bridge trilogy—there is a reversal of these time-space characteristics. Instead of the immaterial, nonspace of the cybernetic encounter, the bridge is a place of excessive materiality where images of clashing temporality are preserved within its very structure. In Virtual Light (1993), the first of the trilogy, Gibson first describes the bridge as follows:

The integrity of its span was rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic. At night, illuminated by Christmas bulbs, by recycled neon, by torchlight, it possessed a queer medieval energy. By day, seen from a distance, it reminded him of the ruin of England’s Brighton Pier, as though viewed through some cracked kaleidoscope of vernacular style. ²³

Like the castle of Bakhtin’s gothic novel, where “the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form,” the futuristic structure of Gibson’s San Francisco bridge combines technologies of old and new—Christmas bulbs, recycled neon, torchlight—to create a site where traces of other times, places, and utilities are simultaneously preserved and repurposed in service of the new. ²⁴ Unlike Bakhtin, Gibson immediately contrasts this architectural description with that of a character’s experience of that same chronotopic vision:

He’d first seen it by night, three weeks before. . . . He’d stared back into the cavern-mouth, heart pounding. . . . Everything ran together, blurring, melting in the fog. Telepresence had only hinted at the magic and singularity of the thing, and he’d walked slowly forward, into that neon maw and all that patchwork carnival of scavenged surfaces, in perfect awe. Fairyland. Rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from the walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic, polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors, chrome gone dull and peeling in the salt air. So many things, too much for his reeling eye, and he’d known that his journey had not been in vain. ²⁵

Whereas Gibson captures a tone of objectivity in the previous description, here he offers an alternative vision that emphasizes the viewer’s affective response. In this version, viewing the bridge is like glimpsing “fairyland,” an experience that can only be inaccurately described as “telepresence,” of being in two places at once, both here and elsewhere. Gibson’s vision of the bridge reads like a catalog of temporal dualities—“rain-silvered plywood, broken marble from walls of forgotten banks, corrugated plastic”—or objects that reflect temporality—“polished brass, sequins, painted canvas, mirrors.” To see the bridge, then, is to see time made visible in space. To experience the bridge is to be overcome by images of simultaneity. Gibson’s articulation of temporal experience prefigures Burges and Elias’s characterization of the postwar present as “an experience of simultaneity.” ²⁶ In this way, we might read the bridge as offering a glimpse of how simultaneity begins to resist the dominating temporal logic of the present.

Another such glimpse can be seen in Gibson’s Pattern Recognition , a novel that from its very inception was engaged with considerations of time. The first of what has become known as the Blue Ant trilogy, Pattern Recognition is significant in Gibson’s oeuvre as the first of his novels to be set in the present rather than the future. In a talk for a New York book expo in May 2010, Gibson reflected on this shift, explaining that he had become frustrated with readers for refusing to see his so-called future settings as engaging directly with the present. He recalls, “I began to tell interviewers, somewhat testily, that I believed I could write a novel set in the present, our present, then, which would have exactly the affect of my supposedly imaginary futures . . . so I did.” ²⁷ With Pattern Recognition , Gibson set out to show how science fiction could be used to write about the present; in doing so, he recalls, “I found the material of the actual twenty-first century richer, stranger, more multiplex, than any imaginary twenty-first century could ever have been. And it could be unpacked with the toolkit of science fiction. I don’t really see how it can be unpacked otherwise, as so much of it is so utterly akin to science fiction, complete with a workaday level of cognitive dissonance we now take utterly for granted.” ²⁸

Despite Gibson’s insistence on his ability to “use the toolkit of science fiction” to examine the twenty-first century, for many critics, Pattern Recognition marks a significant shift from his previous work. Some attribute the shift as one of genre. ²⁹ For others, the significance is linked more to the feeling that the novel provides a diagnostic of the contemporary as trapped within what Fredric Jameson has referred to as the “perpetual present,” or the postmodern condition of the contemporary as being devoid of any potential for futurity. ³⁰ For the latter, these readings stem partly from an often-quoted conversation between Cayce, a freelance advertising consultant, and Hubertus Bigend, the founder of Blue Ant’s global enterprise. In response to a question about how future generations will view the present, Bigend retorts: “We have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on.” ³¹ It is particularly important that this declaration of “no future” is proclaimed by the novel’s stand-in for contemporary capitalism—Bigend, the CEO of a multinational corporation. After all, as Neil Easterbrook points out, “Bigend’s unusually comic name invokes the Swiftian intertext of people who cannot understand the absurdity of their own beliefs or behaviors.” ³² Bigend’s early declaration of “no future” echoes the dangerous path of capitalism’s insistence on contemporaneity, but at times the text seems to betray this dominating sense of a perpetually stalled present tense. Indeed, the formal construction of the novel complicates Bigend’s negative prophecy of the end of time.

With Pattern Recognition , Gibson periodically bends the novel form to represent the existence of competing temporalities in a single interval of the present. At first glance, the novel is relatively linear; indeed, as Easterbrook points out, “the novel itself remains the most conventionally linear of Gibson’s long fictions . . . it tells a single continuous narrative around a single character, lacks the jump-cuts characteristics of his earlier work, and so forth.” ³³ The novel follows only a single character, but it moves with that character all around the world. Cayce’s search for the anonymous creator of a series of viral film clips has her visit London, Tokyo, Moscow, and eventually Paris. This narrative movement creates what Veronica Hollinger refers to as “a kind of formal representation of the present as a condition of incessant and spatialized movement.” ³⁴ The movement becomes spatially dizzying, but it also disrupts one’s sense of time. Throughout the novel, Cayce is in a perpetual state of jet lag, a condition caused by traveling quickly across time zones, essentially making the body and mind operate in two different temporal registers. For Cayce, this jet lag manifests as “soul-delay,” a mental state that “plays tricks with subjective time, expanding or telescoping it as seemingly random.” ³⁵ At the level of content, the novel is preoccupied with issues of temporal simultaneity. At the level of form, despite its overwhelmingly straightforward structure, there are intervals and interruptions—to borrow from Rancière—that disrupt the otherwise linear flow of Pattern Recognition .

One such disruption occurs when Cayce enters a Pilates studio, something she does surprisingly often within the novel. In the studio, multiple temporalities collide as Gibson narrates Cayce’s experience of simultaneity:

She’s down for a jack move . Thinks this in the Pilates studio in Neal’s Yard, doing the Short Spine Stretch, her bare feet in leather loops that haven’t yet been softened up with use. . . . What she’s tempted to do, she knows, is crazy . She exhales, watching her straightened legs rise up in the straps to a ninety-degree angle, then inhales as she bends them, holding tension in the straps against the pull of the spring-loaded platform she’s reclining on. Exhales, as they say, for nothing, then inhales as she straightens them horizontally, pulling the springs taut. Repeating this six more times for a total of ten. She shouldn’t be thinking about anything except getting this right, and that’s partly why she does it. Stops her thinking, if she concentrates sufficiently . . . . Now she’s sitting cross-legged, doing Sphinx, springs lightened. Turns her hands palm-up for Beseech. No thinking. You do not get there by thinking about not thinking, but by concentrating on each repetition. To the gentle twanging of the springs . ³⁶

I’ve added emphasis throughout this passage to capture the fascinating juxtaposition between Cayce’s mind and body in a moment of simultaneity. As readers, we are watching Cayce move and seeing her think. But formally, this is happening at the same time, sometimes even within the same sentence. This is just one of several moments throughout Pattern Recognition when the aesthetic bends slightly to accommodate different kinds of temporal experiences.

Another occurs each time Cayce checks her email. An otherwise mundane and repetitive exercise, her frequent email reading proves to be a complex experience to capture in narrative, partly because the novel must lapse into brief segments of temporal simultaneity. In these sections, the novel switches abruptly to boldface sans serif type:

She is ready for an early night, on CPST, and is checking her mail prior to brushing her teeth. Parkaboy first up.

Judy hasn’t left Darryl’s since my last message . . . What I want to know is, is any of this worth it? Are you getting anywhere? Any closer at all?

Maybe, she decides. That’s all she can tell him.

Maybe. I’ve got something in play here, but it may take a while to see whether it works. When I know more, you will.

Send.

Boone next.

Greetings from the Holiday Inn down the road from the technology park . . . Next stop, the lounge downstairs, where some of the weaker sheep of the firm in question may congregate. You okay?

That really is the slow route, she thinks, though she doesn’t know what else he should be trying, other than buddying up with Sigil employees. ³⁷

This exchange continues, and similar moments reappear throughout the novel. By organizing the text this way, Gibson formally captures a very particular kind of temporal simultaneity, one that has become a significant part of everyday existence but still feels science fictional in nature.

Although these examples seem inconsequential, they succeed in interrupting the otherwise linear flow of Gibson’s text. They bring multiple temporalities into collision. These instances of simultaneity interrupt the illusion of contemporaneity privileged by postmodern culture by calling into question what Rancière calls the “thesis of the homogeneity of time.” ³⁸ In other words, we see glimpses of this “calling to question” in the breaks and fissures of the linear aesthetic of Pattern Recognition . By the time we get to The Peripheral , an explicitly temporal aesthetic has permeated the entirety of the novel’s formal structure.

In The Peripheral (2014), Gibson returns to the future, but this time he writes about not a single future but two. The Peripheral toggles between two storylines: one set in a small rural town in America in the near future and the other in London during the early twenty-second century, seventy years after the first timeline. (For purposes of clarity, I distinguish between these two timelines as the “near-future” and the “far-future.”) In the far-future, an apocalyptic event known as “the Jackpot” has eliminated nearly 80 percent of the world’s population, leaving a world largely run by a small percentage of the global elite. In the near-future, the Jackpot has not yet happened, and the main protagonist is Flynne Fisher, a young American from a rural town who makes her living as a freelance gamer and computer programmer. It is important to note that these timelines do not fall within the same linear path; that is, the far-future world is not Flynne’s future. Flynne’s timeline is an alternative, a stub, a path heading in one direction, but not necessarily the same direction as the post-Jackpot future. In Flynne’s world, there is no clear future, but there is the potential for an alternative.

Although this formal structure resembles the narrative mode Gibson adopted in Spook Country (2007) and Zero History (2010), there are important differences. In the previous novels, the narrative jumps between several plotlines, following three separate characters as they navigate different parts of the same world. Only when the characters physically cross paths at the end of these novels do the separate narratives finally come into contact. These novels resemble Pattern Recognition ’s linear structure, but they fragment that structure into parallel, forward-moving plotlines. In The Peripheral , the narrative moves back and forth in time, creating a formal structure that begins to feel a bit like time travel. In fact, Gibson invites such a comparison by quoting a line from H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine as the epigraph to the novel: “I have already told you of the sickness and confusion that comes with time travelling.” As Glyn Morgan points out, “Almost as significant as this quote from Wells are the lines which Gibson omits. Taken from the scene in which the Time Traveller frantically escapes, Wells’s novel continues: ‘and this time I was not seated properly in the saddle, but sideways in an unstable fashion.’” ³⁹ In this context, the epigraph is both an invitation and a warning. Traveling through time in The Peripheral is more jarring than a traditional time-travel narrative because one does not leave behind one timeline for another; instead, readers find themselves occupying multiple temporalities simultaneously. ⁴⁰

One way to describe the novel’s form is through the concept of narrative leveling. According to John Pier, narrative leveling describes the relationship between “an act of narration and the diegesis or spatial-temporal universe within which a story takes place.” ⁴¹ The term is useful for articulating the complex narrative structures of framed tales or stories with multiple narrators embedded in them. In these texts, a character may begin to tell a story, but then, “a character in that story can, in turn, become an intradiegetic narrator whose narrative, at the second level, will then be a metadiegetic narrative. This process can extend to further meta-levels, forming a series of narratives patterned recursively in the fashion of Chinese boxes or Russian dolls.” ⁴² By modifying the framework slightly, we can use this image of stories nested in other stories to help us understand the multiplicity of timelines in Gibson’s text. We might imagine The Peripheral as structured in a form of temporal leveling: timelines nested within timelines. Narratively, the novel jumps back and forth between the two timelines, but the timelines continually bleed into each other as characters from one interact with those from the other. By the end, it becomes difficult, sometimes impossible, to separate the two.

Through this elaborate form of temporal leveling, Gibson presents readers with two separate worlds, existing at different points in time but connected virtually. At the beginning of the novel, this connection works like a futuristic video game: those in the near-future can log in to an online server and get a direct video feed into the far-future London. The catch is that although the far-future knows they are interacting with real people from the past, those in the near-future have no idea that they are seeing into the future. Only after Flynne witnesses a murder in the far-future is the connection between the two worlds made transparent to all parties. The rest of the novel follows the investigation of this murder, an event that inadvertently brings the timelines into more direct contact. This contact soon begins to alter the lives of those on both ends of the temporal spectrum. As the narrative progresses, the two timelines become increasingly more intertwined with characters sometimes finding themselves occupying both timelines simultaneously. This simultaneity can be cognitive, physical, or both.

At the start of The Peripheral , this simultaneity occurs visually and is reproduced formally in much the same way as Cayce’s email checking in Pattern Recognition . For example, early in the novel Flynne uses her phone to control a drone in the far-future while sitting comfortably in her own present. With the drone, she has been instructed to keep paparazzi cameras (she refers to these as bugs) away from the exterior of a luxury apartment building. As she narrates the things she sees in the futuristic London, the materiality of her present keeps interrupting the narrative of that alternative temporality:

Went hard at a dragonfly, front camera. Didn’t matter how fast she went, they were just gone. Then a horizontal rectangle folded out and down, becoming a ledge, showing her a wall of frosted glass, glowing.

Took the jerky out of her mouth, put it on the table . The bugs were back, jockeying for position in front of the window, if that was what it was. Her free hand found the Red Bull, popped it. She sipped .

Then the shadow of a woman’s slim butt appeared, against the frosted glass. Then shoulder blades, above. Just shadows. Then hands, a man’s by their size, on either side, above the shadows of the woman’s shoulder blades, his fingers spread wide.

Swallowed, the drink like thin cold cough syrup . “Scoot,” she said, and swept through the bugs, scattering them. ⁴³

In the passage noted, I’ve italicized the moments when the narrative attention switches from the future to the present. The scene continues in this manner with the two temporalities existing in the same moment, sometimes even in the same sentence. Interestingly, as we get to the end of this passage, it becomes even more impossible to maintain the distinction between the two timelines. Flynne’s brother calls, and she discusses her action in the “game” (which is actually the future) with him in real time:

Anything ever happen in this game?

“Those cams,” he said. “You edging them back?”

“Yeah. And sort of a balcony’s folded out. Long frosted glass

window, lights on inside. Saw shadows of people.”

“Saw a blimp or something. Where’s it supposed to be?”

“Nowhere. Just keep those cams back.” . . .

She lunged at the bugs. ⁴⁴

Scenes like this fill the pages of Gibson’s novel. Even when a chapter begins inside one timeline, the action soon blurs the boundaries between the two temporalities. Characters find themselves split between body and mind: they are physically present in one world, while cognitively inhabiting two timelines at once.

As the novel progresses, even the physical barriers to inhabiting multiple timelines begin to erode. Indeed, the most explicit figuration of simultaneity within the novel is “the peripheral” itself. The nonsentient robotic extensions of the novel’s title, peripherals host the consciousness of individual characters so that they can inhabit the two timelines at once. Referred to as “anthropomorphic drone[s]” and “telepresence avatar[s],” the peripherals are “extensions,” “accessories,” and most important, a way for characters like Flynne to enter into the space of the future. ⁴⁵ Many readings of Gibson’s text focus on the affective nature of The Peripheral —that is, the author’s move from the visual perception to touch, from mirror shades and virtual light glasses to the peripheral or the haptic. ⁴⁶ We might also read Gibson’s move to the peripheral as a move toward simultaneity. When Flynne enters the peripheral, she is mentally and physically in two temporalities at once. This registers on the affective and material levels. For example, the first time Flynne enters a peripheral, one of the other characters realizes that Flynne “completely altered the peripheral’s body language.” ⁴⁷ “Inhabited,” he explains, “its face became not hers but somehow her.” ⁴⁸ Flynne obtains sensory experience while inside the peripheral: “Flynne raised her hand, touched her face, not thinking. . . . Like touching herself through something that wasn’t quite there.” ⁴⁹ At the same time, her body is still in the past, so her action in the future is continually interrupted by the “autonomic bleed-over” or the physical needs of her body: hunger, sleep, digestion, and so on. ⁵⁰ Thus, the concept of the peripheral offers a literal translation of the cognitive experience of living in temporal simultaneity.

How do we make sense of this novelistic rendering of simultaneity? I want to propose that we not take for granted Gibson’s insistence on science fiction as being the only tool kit capable of making sense of the present. With The Peripheral , Gibson crafts a novel that’s form attempts to capture and represent the temporal experience of living in the now. In other words, through this process of temporal leveling, Gibson uses the form of his novel to disrupt that singular notion of time that we imagine to be somehow captured and contained by a manmade device we call a wristwatch. In an interview about the process of writing The Peripheral , Gibson reflected: “I’m continually grateful for not being in the middle of writing a physical time travel story like the ones that I’d grown up on. But as our geography slowly dissolves into the digital, then it gets very interesting. Because if you can sit in a hangar in Kansas and fly a drone bomber over Pakistan, and give yourself really bad jet lag by doing that long enough, where are we actually?” ⁵¹ With this example, Gibson captures some of the ways humans currently inhabit multiple times at once. In this case, simultaneity works in service to the time of domination. Perhaps there are other moments of multiplicity that disrupt, interrupt, and intervene in the dominant form of time—moments that resist that notion of time that threatens to trap us within its temporal constraints. Perhaps this is the value of The Peripheral ’s formal complexity.

Despite his rather bleak theorization of global entrapment in the time of domination, Rancière ended his 2011 lecture with a somewhat hopeful suggestion. “But I think,” he suggests, “that it is possible to investigate the potentialities of art forms that work at the crossroads of temporalities and worlds of experience. I think it is possible to explore their capacity to echo what happens in the intervals and interruptions that tend to distend or disrupt the time of domination.” ⁵² With The Peripheral , Gibson creates such an art form. Rather than succumb to the novelistic tendency toward progression and linearity, he crafts a novel that forces readers to confront two temporalities simultaneously. Indeed, for the characters in the novel, the future and the past are not one or stable—there are two possible (and perhaps many more) alternative futures. In the near-future the Jackpot has not yet happened but inevitably draws closer. In the far-future, the world is controlled by a wealthy global elite. Thus, Gibson’s multiple temporalities imagine both the impending disaster of climate change and its aftermath while simultaneously imagining the future distribution of wealth and power under global capitalism. As Gibson admits, the ending of The Peripheral is far from happy; he refers to its last two chapters as “the creepiest stuff I’ve ever written.” ⁵³ On the aesthetic level, Gibson’s project echoes the hopefulness of Rancière’s provocative conclusion. The Peripheral demonstrates a narrative form that exposes the temporal contradictions of our present while leaving any sense of closure yet to be determined. If as Rancière suggests, “today, just as yesterday, the tension of living in several times at once remains unsolved,” then perhaps Gibson’s fiction helps us inhabit that tension as a path forward. ⁵⁴