He especially credits Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner’s ‘Mozart in Mirrorshades’ for informing the time travel aspect of his novel. While ‘The Peripheral’ is a unique story on all fronts, Gibson confessed that there were several other sci-fi stories that influenced his creation of this new world. “I decided that what was on the other side of the video game screen for Flynne was this relatively far-future London, run by those guys, and it instantly worked,” he added. It impacted Gibson so much that he decided to put London as the other main setting of his story. And it completely delighted me,” he said. “He started telling me in glorious, and possibly completely fictional detail-I’ve never had the heart to look it up-how the government of the city of London actually works, how spookily non-democratic it manages in some ways to be, and how nobody ever really elects these people. One time, Gibson was visiting London when he met a friend, who started talking about the political structure of things in the city. London serves as one of the important settings in the show and taking ‘The Peripheral’ there definitively molded its story. From here, things moved forward very quickly. Once the characters seemed to be in the right place and the kind of people he wanted to follow, he started expanding the story, focusing on the world that they were living in. I didn’t really have anything else at all, and I didn’t know when it was, and I was just trying to channel the feeling of this girl who was the character,” he said. “I had this girl walking down a hill to go to see her brother who lived in a house trailer. For ‘The Peripheral’, the idea came to him as a very simple scene.

The author is previously known for creating sci-fi stories that dig into futuristic technology while also focusing on the political and climatic future of the world.

Yes, ‘The Peripheral’ is based on the 2014 book of the same name by William Gibson – it is not based on a video game.

Is The Peripheral Based on a Book? Image Credit: Sophie Mutevelian/Prime Video

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