Ecological Recentering in William Gibson’s The Peripheral

Abstract

William Gibson’s response to the rise of computing established him as a pioneering voice in twentieth-century science fiction, his finger not just on but shaping the pulse of his time. Gibson’s novel The Peripheral (2014) is no different. It responds to current, rising anxieties pertaining to climate change, shifting from his earlier ecoperipheral cyberpunk purview to a more holistic one, in which ecology is at least as much at the forefront of the future as is technology. This article draws on and expands Bakhtin’s chronotope to investigate how Gibson uses ecological time, particularly plant time, to reorient the trajectory of future imaginings. In doing so, he enmeshes that which had previously been relegated to the margins in his work, both socially and environmentally.