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The Peripheral
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 14 hrs and 5 mins
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DON'T MISS THE SERIES—NOW STREAMING EXCLUSIVELY ON PRIME VIDEO!
Flynne Fisher lives down a country road, in a rural America where jobs are scarce, unless you count illegal drug manufacture, which she’s trying to avoid. Her brother Burton lives on money from the Veterans Administration, for neurological damage suffered in the Marines’ elite Haptic Recon unit. Flynne earns what she can by assembling product at the local 3D printshop. She made more as a combat scout in an online game, playing for a rich man, but she’s had to let the shooter games go.
Wilf Netherton lives in London, seventy-some years later, on the far side of decades of slow-motion apocalypse. Things are pretty good now, for the haves, and there aren’t many have-nots left. Wilf, a high-powered publicist and celebrity-minder, fancies himself a romantic misfit, in a society where reaching into the past is just another hobby.
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Critic reviews
“Spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer and all the maturity and sly wit of Spook Country. It’s brilliant.”—Cory Doctorow
“From page one, The Peripheral ticks and sings with the same controlled, dark energy and effortless grace of language....Like the best of Gibson’s early, groundbreaking work, it offers up the same kind of chewy, tactile future that you can taste and smell and feel on your skin; that you believe, immediately, like some impossible documentary, because the thing that Gibson has always been best at is offering up futures haunted by the past.”—NPR
“[Gibson is] revered not just as a unique and brilliantly talented SF novelist but a social and psychological visionary....[The Peripheral] creates a future that is astoundingly inventive and frighteningly plausible....A wonderful addition to a brilliant oeuvre.”—The Sunday Times (UK)
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Matilda Case isn't like most folks. In fact, she's unique in the world, the crowning achievement of her father's experiments - a girl pieced together from bits. Or so she believes. That is, until Abraham Seventh shows up at her door, stitched with life thread just like her and insisting that enemies are coming to kill them all. Tilly is one of thirteen incredible creations known as the galvanized, stitched together beings who are immortal and unfathomably strong.
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Disappointing
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By: Devon Monk
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How to Find Your Way in the Dark
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Twelve-year old Sheldon Horowitz is still recovering from the tragic loss of his mother only a year ago when a suspicious traffic accident steals the life of his father near their home in rural Massachusetts. It is 1938, and Sheldon, who was in the truck, emerges from the crash an orphan hell-bent on revenge. He takes that fire with him to Hartford, where he embarks on a new life under the roof of his buttoned-up Uncle Nate.
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Absolutely wonderful story.
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By: Derek B. Miller
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The Blue Hour
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- Narrated by: Tavia Gilbert
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Tim Hess is a semiretired veteran cop staring at a death sentence - his own. Detective Merci Rayborn, young enough to be his daughter, is brash, impatient, and not someone from whom Hess wants to be taking orders. He certainly isn't planning on falling in love with her. Together, they must track down a psychopathic killer who's been abducting beautiful young women from the malls of Orange County.
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Outstanding book, exceptional reader
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The Right Side
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- Narrated by: Susan Bennett
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- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
LeAnne Hogan went to Afghanistan as a rising star in the military and came back a much lesser person, mentally and physically. Now missing an eye and with half her face badly scarred, she can barely remember the disastrous desert operation that almost killed her. She is confused, angry, and suspects the fault is hers, even though nobody will come out and say it. Shattered by one last blow - the sudden death of her hospital roommate, Marci - LeAnne finds herself on a fateful drive across the country, reflecting on her past and seeing no future.
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Congratulations to Spencer Quinn
- By cherry patrick jamison on 07-14-17
By: Spencer Quinn
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Sleepless
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- Unabridged
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Story
The world is in the grip of an epidemic of sleeplessness and one man will risk everything to find out what caused it. In his signature style of fast-paced action, outrageous violence, and graphically described scenes, we are tossed into a dramatic turbulence unlike anything you've ever read or heard.
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Stunning
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By: Charlie Huston
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Short Squeeze
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Meet smart-aleck Southampton attorney Jackie Swaitkowski. Her business relies on constant movement of Hamptons' real estate market. After making an odd request to evict his sister-in-law from his home, one of her clients turns up dead. Jackie would have expected that to be the end of it, but an envelope found on the corpse contains an item so unusual that she finds herself working on something bigger, and more dangerous, than real estate.
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Great Listen - Good Series
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By: Chris Knopf
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Infinite Jest
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A gargantuan, mind-altering comedy about the Pursuit of Happiness in America set in an addicts' halfway house and a tennis academy, and featuring the most endearingly screwed-up family to come along in recent fiction, Infinite Jest explores essential questions about what entertainment is and why it has come to so dominate our lives; about how our desire for entertainment affects our need to connect with other people; and about what the pleasures we choose say about who we are.
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Removing Endnotes Does NOT Equal Unabridged!
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Burn
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It's the middle of a sweltering late-summer heat wave in Los Angeles. In the nearby mountains, a seasonal wildfire burns out of control. If not for this fire, authorities might never have discovered wreckage of an Alfa Romeo convertible - or the body of the car's driver - in the dense underbrush at the bottom of Topanga Canyon. But when firefighters happen across the crash site while battling the nearby blaze, it's only a matter of time and basic forensics before the apparent accident is upgraded to homicide.
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Narrator
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The Last Dead Girl
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Performance
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Story
On a rainy night in April, a chance encounter on a lonely road draws David into a romance with Jana Fletcher, a beautiful young law student. Jana is an enigma: living in a run-down apartment and sporting a bruise on her cheek that she refuses to explain. David would like to know her secrets, but he lets them lie-until it's too late. When Jana is brutally murdered, the police consider David a prime suspect.
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A great, dark read, appropriate reader too.
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Cold City
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Overall
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Performance
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If you've never read a Repairman Jack novel, this is the place to begin. It's 1990. A twenty-one-year-old named Jack has dropped out of college, leaving his old life behind to build a new one in New York City. Manhattan's rough edges are jagged enough to shred any unwary newcomer, but perhaps not one who is determined to stay off the grid, at any cost, in the busiest metropolis on earth. And to do so, he'll have to take jobs of a less than legal nature.
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Fun, as long you don't think too much
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Since We Fell
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Since We Fell follows Rachel Childs, a former journalist who, after an on-air mental breakdown, now lives as a virtual shut-in. In all other respects, however, she enjoys an ideal life with an ideal husband. Until a chance encounter on a rainy afternoon causes that ideal life to fray. As does Rachel's marriage. As does Rachel herself. Sucked into a conspiracy thick with deception, violence, and possibly madness, Rachel must find the strength within herself to conquer unimaginable fears and mind-altering truths.
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Wait ....
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Company Town
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They call it Company Town - a city-size oil rig off the coast of the Canadian Maritimes, now owned by one very wealthy, powerful, byzantine family: Lynch Ltd. Hwa is of the few people in her community (which constitutes the whole rig) to forgo bioengineered enhancements. As such, she's the last truly organic person left on the rig - making her doubly an outsider as well as a neglected daughter and bodyguard extraordinaire.
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Different
- By J.G. Brandt on 01-16-17
By: Madeline Ashby
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What listeners say about The Peripheral
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
- Tristan G R Wall
- 05-29-15
Worst Narration Ever
What would have made The Peripheral better?
A different narrator.
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Lorelei King?
Anyone. She has such a terrible way of speaking for this book. It's so breathy and feels like it should be in a romance novel. It absolutely threw me off and I couldn't listen to anymore of this. I'll get the book on Kindle because I really want to understand the story but I just really can't believe who ever is in charge of getting the narrator though that she was a good choice. It makes me sad because they probably won't get a different narrator either. What a waist of my time and money.
Any additional comments?
Usually I don't put the overall score down because of bad narration but I did in this case because it was such a terrible mis-match that the story was unbearable.
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87 people found this helpful
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- geuis
- 05-17-15
Good story, flat voice actor
Would you try another book from William Gibson and/or Lorelei King?
I love Gibson. This narrator only had two voices, one male and one female. I tried listening to the first hour 4 times until I gave up tonight and wrote this.
Would you be willing to try another one of Lorelei King’s performances?
No.
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65 people found this helpful
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- Rebecca
- 12-20-14
Narrator ruined it
Would you recommend this book to a friend? Why or why not?
Yes but only to read. The narrator for this is not a good match.
What didn’t you like about Lorelei King’s performance?
She's is well suited for romance fiction and reads everything in a breathy manner unsuited to this genre and specifically this story. She completely ruined this book for me.
If this book were a movie would you go see it?
Yes. But only if Lorelei King has nothing to do with it.
Any additional comments?
Gibson is one of my all time favorite writers. I've enjoyed audio versions of his works up to this point. Please don't use King again for his work. It's a very bad pairing.
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57 people found this helpful
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- CLRH2O
- 05-23-17
Gibson is great, narrator is unbelievably bad.
It pains me to say this, but while Gibson's work has been and likely always will be incredible (each time in new ways)... the narration of this particular book has nearly ruined the the entire experience. It's taken me just over one month fight through completing this listening. If you have the time and access to the physical book, simply skip the audio book and read it yourself - The Peripheral is worth your time.
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48 people found this helpful
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- Christopher R McLaughlin
- 04-27-15
Incredibly great across the board
I've been listening to and reading a lot of really good books lately, but this one beats all of them hands down.
I finished reading a widely acclaimed 2014 book last week that had much more publicity and seemed to get a great deal of critical notice (and is probably on the front page of your audible list too), but doesn't even come close to the quality of this one.
That book left me feeling completely unsatisfied and disappointed with the time I spent reading it. Listening to The Peripheral had the complete opposite effect.
Gibson's writing feels as prescient as Neuromancer (which really foretold the creation of the Internet and cyberspace in the 80s), is wonderfully avant-garde and political, but comes across as thoroughly modern and character driven as any of the great HBO shows. It's also more satisfying than anything else I've read, listened to or seen recently.
I really can't recommend this book enough. Total win.
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47 people found this helpful
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- Darwin8u
- 01-17-16
A Tortured Future Gaming the Past
“History had its fascinations, but could be burdensome.”
― William Gibson, The Peripheral
Gibson might not always be the most accurate futurist, but he's probably the glossiest, the most polished. I actually really dig Gibson. I don't think he's perfect. Sometimes his schtick gets worn a little thin, but I loved Neuromancer and really liked his Blue Ant series ('Pattern Recognition', 'Spook Country', 'Zero History'). 'The Peripheral' shares a similar aesthetic with the Blue Ant books, but jumps into the speculative zone that he mastered with the Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer', 'Count Zero', 'Mona Lisa Overdrive').
'The Peripheral' is set in two futures. One about 30 years from now, and another about 70 years from now. The novel links these two by imagining that through a server in the far future, there is an ability to communicate with the near future. The near future becomes almost a virtual game to the far future. A place where Russian oligarchs and the elite fight tribal wars because they are bored, super rich, and a bit damaged by their own history.
The novel allows Gibson room to explore his favorite issues: technology, paranoia, tribalism, corporatism, information, and mix it with a far future that possesses the ability to indulge their rich 'continua enthusiasts' with an ability to communicate information (not actual time travel) back and forth with their past (our future). That jump/postulation allows Gibson room to riff on how a window a thin window between time allows for the transfer of technology, etc., that can unsettle both economies and nations (duh, but most things that ring true seem almost innately obvious before written down). It also, because it is written by Gibson, lets him verbally play with fabric, fashion, tattoos, and other cultural eccentricities that he seems to always seem to understand a couple decades ahead of the rest of us.
One thing I've noticed about Gibson is his ability to desex his novels. There are both women and men in his novels. Heroes and heroines, but they operate with similar skills and capabilities. They both seem to exist in an androgynous asexual universe that isn't genderless or without sex, but almost seems to exist beyond sex (Postgender?), where gender is almost immaterial; an after thought. Gender exists with Gibson as a hanger to drape a clingy dress or a cashmere coat on and that is about it. Perhaps, this came from his quick uptake on how the cyber world would melt the edges of sexuality. The loss of a body through the Internet or the transference to another body (interacting with the world through a drone or a robot/cyborg) suddenly removes gender all together, or allows for a bunch of different interactions and iterations with gender.
Anyway, if you like speculative fiction, fashion, or just a well-crafted story, you could always do a lot worse than William Gibson. And if his track record is any clue, reading Gibson might just be a window on what ONE stub of our near or far future might look like.
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- jchafin
- 10-07-15
Liked the story but hated the performance
If you could sum up The Peripheral in three words, what would they be?
Like the concept
Who would you have cast as narrator instead of Lorelei King?
Hard to say... I really like James Marster from the Dresden Files books but wouldn't use him hear. The performance made it had to listen too
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
nope
Any additional comments?
I
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- Bracken McKracken
- 04-18-15
Amazing vision of the future
While swapping between two timeline/realities, an epic battle of wills unfolds. The near future so plausible and so deeply observant of current trends, is brought through the eyes of the unwilling heroine. The farther future is so advanced it's almost anti-cyberpunk, but so logically the next steps past dystopia and entropy where nanotech takes a central role. It's still a frightening and enthralling future; still such a clear path from where we are headed today. The mystery and tension he weaves throughout ratchets up constantly. Never fear the dose of jargon almost every bit is explained somewhere along the wild ride.
Beware the heavy dose of expletives.
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- Eleanor
- 01-22-15
Kind of disappointing
I generally like near future speculative fiction (e.g. Stross's Halting State or Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties and Pattern Recognition) but this book never really grabbed me. The book starts in media res, in a way that is confusing, alienating (since it starts with the most unlikable characters) and weirdly similar to the beginning of Stross's Accelerado. I found it very hard to care about most of the characters. I think Gibson was aiming for noir, but he ended up with a kind of Apple Store shallow gloss. And King's general lack of affect didn't help. I also got very frustrated with the speculative fiction aspect. His information time travel idea opens up all kinds of potential plot complications which are never addressed.
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- Jeremy
- 11-23-14
Excellent Book!
This is very good science fiction. Definitely worth a credit. A bit of a challenge to follow in the beginning but it comes together and makes for an interesting and captivating story.
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