William Gibson’s 2014 science-fiction novel, The Peripheral, is the quintessence of Gibsonism—or of one of its major strands, at least. In his first three novels, and again in this one, infotech and biotech abound. The gadgetry is sometimes inviting, sometimes forbidding; the world is saturated with thingness, both material and cultural; a sort of alienated restlessness drives many of the characters. The atmosphere as well as the plot are noirish. Though the novels that followed his first trilogy dwell in a time just beyond the present, in The Peripheral Gibson gets back to the future—two futures, in fact. It’s a murder mystery split across two time periods, a farther-future world whose characters occupy a much-changed London, and a nearer future depicting an economically depressed, rural region of America. Technology, capitalist consolidation, and other developments make both places strange—familiar in some ways, inscrutable in others. The only thing it’s safe to say about the upcoming Amazon Prime Video adaptation, by Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan, is that it’s likely to differ from the novel, because that’s become almost de rigueur. The Peripheral begins streaming on October 21. —John E. Branch Jr.