I WAS watching the new series based on William Gibson's 2014 sci-fi novel The Peripheral when I had one of those nerdy, latenight realisations: cyberpunk has become the retro-future, a vision of tomorrow that feels like the past. Even Gibson himself, who coined the term "cyberspace", has stopped writing cyberpunk, a subgenre devoted to corporate dystopias centred on virtual reality and sentient AI. The Peripheral is a far cry from his 1980s novel Neuromancer, in which hackers "jack into" a virtual metropolis. The Peripheral conjures a very different world, where kleptocrats from the future have figured out how to send data back in time and are using it to manipulate people.
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