Reviews with content warning for War - Периферийные устройства

I enjoyed the bulk of this book. The chapters are short and readable with a pretty quick pace. The concept of the Jackpot is scarily plausible and the timeline still feels believable 9 years after the book was published. The tech is cool and enough of the characters are interesting.

There are many scifi books written by men that get gross about women's bodies, either in service to the "women's sexual degradation as evidence of society's immorality/decline" trope or just to be lurid. Gibson could've very easily gotten gross here or subjected Flynne to some serious abuse but for the most part he didn't, and his female identifying characters weren't any more or less developed than the others.

Unfortunately the situation that draws Flynne and all of the over characters into the action is confusing and not very well resolved. The big bad was underdeveloped as a character. I still don't totally understand the icky plastic life forms that appear in the first scene and one other with Wilf. The TV show does a much better job of creating an inciting incident for the escalation of stakes that follows. Having watched the Amazon adaptation first helped me connect to the characters, visualize the settings, and get past the bizarre and somewhat confusing opening scene of the book.

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themysteriouserk's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark funny mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Plot
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.5

Like the best among Gibson’s other books, this novel balances thrills with speculation about the future and thoughts about where we are now. In this novel, Gibson considers ecological catastrophe, class struggle, veterans’ lives, the influence of megacorporations, and the decreasing importance of national borders and identity alongside a plot involving alternate realities, organized crime, and dangerous nanorobots. In short, it’s both fun and scary as hell, and feels relevant even when it’s speculative or unrealistic.

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