Maybe there's a parallel timeline where 'The Peripheral' hit the mark

It's a shame that a series with so many interesting ideas didn't try to go farther with them

Amazon Studios TV series The Peripheral, an adaptation of William Gibson's 2014 novel, has come up with an original angle on the overstretched "metaphor for class inequality" trope. In this story, scientists from the late 22nd century create alternate possible pasts where they can run unsanctioned experiments on live humans with cosmic impunity. Those other timelines are not seen as having real moral value, but in one of them lives our protagonist, Flynne, an experienced gamer who stumbles upon these secrets after beta-testing a new VR headset, and who is determined to defend her and her world's inherent right to exist.

This is an amplified echo of the cry of protest you can hear from exoticized peoples: Your Vacation Is My Home. Or, in The Peripheral, something more like Your Disposable Petri Dish Is My Spacetime Continuum. Such a concept sounds like it could spark lengthy discussions about the colonial practices still embedded in scientific research, the ethical loopholes of the gig economy, the rights of counterfactual agents, the mutual responsibilities between generations, and the still unsolved safety issues with brain-computer interfaces.

Unfortunately, the show doesn't meet the high expectations set by its premise. A research institute officially known as The Research Institute and a cleptocracy of mafia bosses collectively known as the Klept are the first signs that The Peripheral devoted only the barest of efforts to worldbuilding. Our near future, as shown in a small town in the southern US, looks almost like the present, with the changes established mostly in dialogue: stratospheric medicine prices, a vaguely mentioned Texan war, ubiquitous 3D printing, far superior video game graphics. With the supporting characters, the show follows the opposite approach: they are established implicitly, with minimal exposition, and the viewer doesn't connect who works for whom and who is whose childhood friend until well into the season. The mental bandwidth expended in keeping track of the scant clues about these characters detracts from the viewer's ability to follow the plot.

In the scenes set in the 22nd century, these deficiencies are multiplied: three separate factions are described but not properly introduced until the halfway point, and Flynne, who should serve as our eyes into that society, is persistently kept in the dark about how it works.

Worse problems afflict the visual style of the 22nd century. We only get to see future London as a vague skyline that blends impossibly cyclopean statues with incompletely rendered ruins, or as deliberately secluded side streets that look like the production team only had access to a small number of set designs. It's true that this society is recovering from multiple catastrophes that killed a huge portion of the world's population, but it's inevitable to get a sense of artifice from the continued recourse to the same few sets and the same few immensely powerful characters without ever learning how ordinary life proceeds for the average human.

The conflict between the near future and the not so near future is hindered by unnecessary mystery. Flynne only discovers what the villain wants from her in the last episode, and then almost by chance. Until then it's hard to get invested in the stakes of her fight, because the show insists on delaying as much as possible the moment of letting the viewer know what every faction wants. The lead characters of this future act as if they were facing an imminent crisis of utmost urgency, but then they spend interminable scenes sitting for tea to exchange barbs about their respective leverage and strategic weak points, and it's no longer believable that there's anything actually being fought over.

The Peripheral suffers gravely from this intentional slowness. Each episode spends too much time in revealing too little at a time, and the way the final two episodes resolve all the plotlines may as well have occurred just after the pilot, if only these characters stopped walking around, looking menacing and launching indirect taunts. This ungenerous pacing, combined with the barely-there London of the future, deals a near-fatal blow to the viewer's suspension of disbelief. It's no wonder that the villains managed to convince Flynne that she was playing a video game instead of visiting a physical place, because this supposedly broken and polluted London looks too small and too fake to take seriously.

There's no word yet on whether Amazon will produce a second season of The Peripheral, but if it comes to pass, the producers should ask for a higher VFX budget or larger outdoor sets, and stop being smugly mysterious just for the sake of being smugly mysterious. The viewer is supposed to be given a reason to care, and this first season relied too much on hidden agendas kept hidden too long for the resolution to have the impact it should.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 6/10.

Bonuses: +1 for showing a realistic brother/sister relationship rich in complexity and disparate perspectives, +3 for T'Nia Miller's wonderful acting.

Penalties: −1 for the criminal underutilization of Alexandra Billings, −1 for having a tad too many extraneous subplots, −3 for the whiplash of following too slow a beginning and middle with too rushed an ending.

Nerd Coefficient: 5/10.

POSTED BY: Arturo Serrano, multiclass Trekkie/Whovian/Moonie/Miraculer, accumulating experience points for still more obsessions.

Microreview [book]: Crossroads of Canopy, by Thoraiya Dyer

If you haven’t read this yet, why on earth not? And if you have yet somehow didn’t like it, seriously: why on earth not?

Dyer, Thoraiya. Crossroads of Canopy. Macmillan, 2017.

You can buy it here, and by the time you’re done reading this review, you’ll want to!

Despite being the target of polarizing reviews (some of which, I am convinced, are consciously or unconsciously motivated by dislike for precisely what makes it unique, namely the unconventional heroine), this story is awesome. Its awesomeness stems partly from its world-building (the unique forest world, consisting of the mysterious Floor, the savage Understory, and the elitist Canopy, with the people and creatures from each a strange and fascinating mix of familiar and alien traits) and partly, perhaps mostly, from its main character. Here’s why heroine Unar is the best female protagonist—and indeed, one of the best protagonists of any biological sex or gender—in years.

Her masculine-without-being-stereotypically-tomboyish femininity:

Unlike the squeaky clean, often virginal heroines of recent popular fantasy and sci fi literature (I’m looking at you, Bella Swan!), Unar has desires…and acts on them. In fact, her coming of age reminded me quite strongly of Tenar’s awakening in Ursula Le Guin’s immortal The Tombs of Atuan. I wonder if Unar’s name might have been inspired by that rather similar story of social and sexual repression, out of which, like two glorious butterflies, these two heroines irrepressibly burst? Unar is not a model of demure femininity; instead, she’s an interesting mix of feminine and (what we might identify as) prototypically masculine traits, especially her tremendous ambition and her hunger for power, qualities that stay-in-the-kitchen traditionalists would doubtless call ‘unfeminine’. Given men’s dismal track record of monopolizing power, controlling female sexuality and indulging their ambitions throughout history (both in the world of Canopy and our own), ‘unfeminine’ girl power doesn’t sound so bad to me.

Thanks for taking a giant dump on the Earthsea cycle, creators of this crappy 2004 miniseries!

Her moral ambiguity:

Generally, heroines are presented as always doing the right thing, so even when, e.g., Katniss Everdeen shoots a certain character in the Hunger Games trilogy, the reader certainly is not meant to question Katniss’s essential goodness. That is, female anti-heroes, true anti-hero(ine) protagonists (not just pure-hearted women forced by cruel circumstances to do bad things, or black-hearted ‘fallen woman’ villains) are very rare, as though even most authors can scarcely conceive of a woman anywhere in the ethical spectrum between the polar extremes of pure goodness and total evil. Unar, however, is decidedly a mixed bag, ethically, and as the reader continues to cheer her on, we too become complicit in some of her darker deeds. I’m not talking about when she’s being mind-controlled, her magic used against her will to harm others; that’s just standard victim stuff. I’m talking about when she does have control: often she acts bravely, and sometimes altruistically, but also occasionally acts out of pure selfishness. Gosh, this mass of contradictions almost sounds like a real person—a lot more than most fairytale heroines, to be sure!

Her overall awesomeness:

Unar is betrayed many times, in many forms, by family, friends and allies, but she is like a juggernaut—nothing can keep her down. She’s also almost unique, given her privileged position, in being quick to recognize the worth of people in a lower social class than her; she both uses their talents for her own ends and, sometimes, uses her own vast powers to help them. She is essentially the only person in her highly and literally stratified world that is able to travel between these distinct layers, combining the best parts of both Canopy and Understory. I can hardly wait until we get a sequel and she begins exploring the still dark and mysterious world of Floor!

The fact that there’s no ‘happily ever after’ in sight:

Usually, books about girls (or boys, for that matter) bring everything to a cathartic and suitably romantic conclusion; the heroine finds and wins the man of her dreams, etc., etc. But Unar has no such too-pat ending waiting for her. Even if no sequel is ever written (though that would be a terrible shame!), Unar’s story is complete in its incompleteness. The worth of a young woman, the sum total of her life, cannot be expressed in hetero(or homo)sexual union—nor is her value necessarily tied to her youth. This story emphasizes that, by focusing more on the life-cycle of the oppressed women of this fictional world, introducing not only Maidens, but also Mothers and Crones, and insisting we the readers take notice of their valuable contributions. Fittingly, at the end Unar finds herself decisively deprived—by her own actions—of the chance to settle down and enjoy a quiet, happy life, and given her morally questionable deeds, her inability to resume her old life, while in a sense a cruel fate, is not a surprising one. It’s only surprising if we the readers have been fed a diet of happily ever afters. I for one am looking forward to future stories about Unar’s fascinating exploits, as something tells me her story is far from over.

 The Math:

Objective Assessment: 6/10

Bonuses: +1 for making such a morally complex, endlessly fascinating heroine as Unar

                +1 for quite creative bout of world-building

Penalties: None!

Nerd coefficient: 8/10 “Totally sweet!”
  

See more about our scoring system (under which 8/10 is quite rare!) here.

This message brought to you by Zhaoyun, aficionado of fictional worlds and devotee of earth-shattering heroines like Unar, and reviewer for Nerds of a Feather since ancient times (2013).

Microreview [book]: From Ice to Ashes by Rhett C. Bruno

Where Cold and Dark Works

Space is making a comeback. Movies like The Martian, Interstellar, and Gravity have been big hits. Have you seen The Expanse? That's a pretty good TV show, better than the source material in my opinion. From Ice to Ashes tells a class struggle story and it succeeds in a lot of ways.

Kale Drayton is a Ringer; a descendant of colonists who escaped Earth on the Saturnian moon Titan. Ringers have physically adapted to the environment of Titan, making them physically weaker and lankier than their Earth counterparts but more adapted to the cold of their new home. Earthers, however, had to evacuate their mother planet due to planet-wide disaster, and now the two are rubbing against each other on Titan. However, the Earthers brought back Earth's many diseases, and Kale's mother languishes in a quarantine zone. Desperate to provide for her on meager wages, Kale takes a gas hauling rotation, with a secondary mission to simply plug in hand terminal (think future smartphone) into a computer onboard the hauler. This simple act puts a long lived plot in motion that eventually changes the entire Sol balance of power.

Let's be honest; From Ice to Ashes cribs a lot from the class conflict aspects of The Expanse books. Ringers are an oppressed people; the Earthers couldn't live without them, but they brought disease back to the ring that Ringers have no medications for. Ringers are the working class Belters, and Earthers are still Earthers. The Earthers in this novel are one-dimensional and there's not a single good one among them. The novel suffers for this because they're the primary antagonist and their every action can be spelled out from the start.

But this isn't really a story about Earthers, it's a story about Ringers and the complex interactions between the Ringer characters is what makes it work. In the Ringers, Bruno crafts more complex characters as Drayton struggles to do anything to make his mother suffer less while contending with a love interest, other Ringers trying to make due, and a people who've been unjustly treated by the Earther guests they descended from. The story takes some time to get moving, but it's hard to put down once it does.

From Ice to Ashes is the second book in this universe, and I intend on going back to read the first. It's a solid class conflict tale told among the rings of Saturn. Though it could stand for a less cartoonish antagonist (or antagonists), but the Ringer characters Bruno develops over the course of the tale more than make up for it.

The Math

Baseline Assessment: 7/10

Bonuses: +1 good character work in the Ringers

Penalties: -1 flat antagonists

Nerd Coefficient: 7/10 (an enjoyable experience, but not without its flaws)

***

POSTED BY: brian, sci-fi/fantasy/video game dork and contributor since 2014

Reference: Bruno, Rhett C. From Ice to Ashes [Hydra, 2017]