The Peripheral

The Peripheral is a science fiction mystery-thriller by the American-Canadian writer William Gibson, published in 2014.

Flynne Fisher holds a household together in a rural American town where jobs outside the drug business have almost disappeared, and she has become skilled at running the beta builds of games for other people. Her brother Burton's military service left him with an implant and a limp, and when an unfamiliar client offers him paid security work that appears to take place inside a simulation, and he cannot take the shift, Flynne takes his place at the headset. The city she is sent into exists in another time as well as another place, and one of the things she is employed to observe turns out to be a murder. The novel runs two stories side by side: Flynne's own place and time, and the London of a publicist who lives seventy years further on and who begins to understand that the case reaches back across the years to the woman in the headset.

Gibson's later novel Agency returns to the same world, and this book is part of his return to science fiction after the trilogy about contemporary design and marketing.