Show Vs Book

[Meredith Quill]

Compare & Contrast Here!

[ratSenoL]

This seems like such an ambitious project. I think the next book in the series, Agency, might have been easier to turn into a TV series (and I hope they do!). Still, so far (I've only seen two), I think they've done a decent job of keeping to the spirit of the book if not the early storyline. Let's see what they do with the rest of it.

Detective Lowbeer better be here!

Edited October 22, 2022 by ratSenoL
to add another thought

[oldCJ]

I actually hated the book. It felt like Gibson wanted the reader to mistake his confusing and vague descriptions with things being interesting and scifi. But they weren’t interesting. And very little he wrote was futuristic or scifi for the 2010s, like 3d printing and personal drones. And even the premise felt derivative with branching of timelines and the role of international politics. The haptics and video game playing in an old trailer felt like it was ripped from Ready Player One. I expected more from the man who wrote such brilliant earlier books.

Gibson spends multiple lines describing a character making a sandwich but then wtf is the reader supposed to do with a single sentence about how pancakes means they were printing with plastic that can be composted. One of those could benefit from more description, the other one is just adding words which he obviously needed to add given how short most of the chapters were with the interesting things happening off-page. The book has so much padding to the story whether it was two chapters with the same information from two characters perspectives or a character describing to to another character something that the reader already experienced in an earlier chapter. Words solely to increase your word count that don’t move a story forward is disrespectful to readers.

The misogyny in the book is in your face. No less than three main female characters described as having tattoos as a huge negative. Daedra’s for a plot point, the female patchers’ “meaningless patterns” to be disdainful of them (as if tripling their chests wasn’t gross enough) and Ash having no control over her animals and her having to hide them to be viewed respectfully. And why tf in the future would a woman want androids that look like “anime babes” for her party? That’s all some basement-dwelling incel waifu crap.

The show on the other hand feels a bit dated in the stereotypical roles men and women play in the Flynne timeline but not in an over the top offensive kind of way like the book, more in a this is a story by an old man who was once very prescient in his ideas of the future but now has a sadly limited imagination given the reality of the current millennium kind of way. 

It’s frustrating because in general I prefer the original books to the tv show. And I used to love reading Gibson’s books. In the case of The Peripheral, though, Gibson’s imagination and writing is patently terrible and sexist. But I am loving the show! Am I am really glad how little it has in common with the books at this point. 

[AuntieMame]

Thank you @oldCJ. I intuited from reading the Amazon page and watching the show and reading the trilogy that put Gibson on the map in the eighties and nineties that the show was a stub of the book universe, but I came here to see if it was worth it to read the book. Because I’m liking the show a lot. I’m guessing your vote would be no, don’t bother but I’m double checking. 

[Notwisconsin]

i figure he may have gotten the idea from the film "Frequencies (2000), which introduces backwards time communication via radio. Dennis Quaid in 1969 communicated with his son  in 2000 via ham radio. i figure that they can't go back any further in time than 2032 because the technology is too primitive to handle it.

[AuntieMame]

2 hours ago, Notwisconsin said:

i figure he may have gotten the idea from the film "Frequencies (2000), which introduces backwards time communication via radio. Dennis Quaid in 1969 communicated with his son  in 2000 via ham radio. i figure that they can't go back any further in time than 2032 because the technology is too primitive to handle it.

Now that’s an interesting idea. Fits in with my theory that the time jumps are minuscule and cumulative from server to server. We would only have had that kind of infrastructure and volume for a short time. Interesting.