It’s through filling in for Burton on one of these jobs that Flynne finds herself in the further future. Protagonist Flynne Fisher (Chloë Grace Moretz, in the biggest role of her adult career) is living with her terminally ill mother Ella (Melinda Page Hamilton) and her brother Burton (Jack Reynor), a veteran who was subjected to technological experiments and now makes money doing jobs in hyper-realistic videogames.

The former is a recognizable extrapolation of present-day America, with virtual reality and 3D printing advancing-and poverty, the cost of healthcare, and the drug crisis worsening. I say “futures” plural because The Peripheral takes place primarily in two different settings: 2032 North Carolina and 2099 London. The Peripheral was his return to inventing new futures, and watching the streaming version eight years later, his vision feels all too plausible. Gibson actually quit writing sci-fi in favor of realistic fiction in the 2000s because reality had caught up with his fiction.

Novels like Neuromancer, written before the public internet was even a thing, read as prophetic decades later. Considered one of the founders of the cyberpunk genre, Gibson’s writing has influenced countless other books, movies, and TV shows, but has rarely been directly adapted to the screen. Prime Video’s new science fiction series The Peripheral is based on the 2014 novel of the same name by William Gibson.

The peripheral book series