>new york time bestseller
i immediately get sceptical

>>25591474
Basically any mildly successful book can get that. It'd be stupid to not include it so it's neither a red or green flag for me.

>>25591466
Been a while since I've read it, the Peripheral was my last Gibson book as he was starting to shit me. He likes to leave you extracting your own plot information. Can you give me a quick summary on what you think is going on and I'll fill in the gaps without spoilers?

>>25591604
Or, if you just want a summary version based on what I remember, and might contain some spoilers: The book takes place across two timelines. One in the further future, containing Netherton, and one in the slightly nearer future, containing Flynne. The near future uses a mystery box technology from China ("Beyond us, like so much else now", shut up Gibson) to allow people in the 'present', Netherton's time, to open 'stubs' and communicate electronically with the past, usually through Panamanian law firms. They can't physically visit. Some people use them to design and test weapons, some use them to torment the pasties, whatever. The timeline splits off at the moment of contact into its own universe. Flynne's world is a stub. It's starting to develop what the Present people call the jackpot, a confluence of factors they've passed through already that all together killed maybe 90 percent of humanity. Her stub world was made to hire poor slavegoy from the past to fly drones instead of using modern systems as a sort of bespoke status symbol. Her brother was being paid to play what he thought was a video game but was in practice those drones - she was covering a shift for him and saw a murder. Now the people who did the murder in the Present have tapped into her 'stub' and want her dead, while the Netherton's employers investigate (they're 'old klep' or future Russian oligarchs, basically) with the aid of transsexual london police.

>>25591604
>>25591629
Not reading this just cause I'm pretty sure it spoils too much. I was more just wondering if I'm dumb for still being very confused but I'm only up to chapters 16 and it seems like I've been following better than I expected. I guess it's just meant to be kinda confusing at first. More so than his Sprawl series.

>>25591641
Yeah. He's really turned a lot of things into habits since he started writing modernish stuff. One of those is just forging through the world often with almost no explanation - sort of like 'meshback' from.. Idoru, I think?

>>25591481
yes it is meaningless

>>25591644
Haven't read Idoru yet. I just finished the Sprawl series and someone who's opinions I trust recommended I start Jackpot and kinda warned me it was difficult to get into but worth it.

>>25591649
You see the patterns developing as you read his older stuff. His trilogy pre Jackpot, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country and Zero History, read like him wanting to show off cool stuff he learned about in the early internet originally and discuss weird government conspiracies. Peripheral got my back up a little on its own, and when I saw the blurb for the sequel to Peripheral ("In a world where Hillary Clinton won in 2016, a black female fbi agent..") I just threw my hands up on his work.

>>25591466
You're meant to pick things up as you go along. Maybe you could ask AI for a summary.

>>25591481
I think it's extremely tacky and I wouldn't include on my book cover (I don't write).