The Peripheral Glossary
The Peripheral (2014) is the first volume of William Gibson’s Jackpot trilogy, followed by Agency (2020) and an unfinished third volume. The novel is set across two timelines: a near-future rural America of stub branches and 3D-printed everything, and a far-future post-jackpot London in which the surviving population lives among the wreckage of the collapse. The two timelines are connected by peripherals — biological telepresence bodies that allow a consciousness from one branch to inhabit a body in another. The novel’s plot turns on a murder witnessed across that gap.
For the Dictionary the most important resident of the book is Ainsley Lowbeer, the Metropolitan Police inspector whose role is the canonical source for the Lowbeer Question entry and for the Aunties model of AI oversight. Lowbeer is the figure of the operator who has accumulated enough authority and enough technological augmentation to function as something like an ancient monster of the surveillance state, in her own self-description, without losing her moral seriousness about it. The Dictionary treats her as a design figure, not just a character.
The novel also introduces the jackpot itself as a worked-through concept rather than a one-line gag, and develops the trilogy’s broader argument that the post-collapse world is run by a small accommodation between the klept (the kleptocratic class) and the surviving institutions that constrain them — an arrangement Gibson presents as neither dystopian nor utopian but as the realistic shape of late-stage governance.
See also
- Jackpot — the civilisational collapse the trilogy is set after
- Aunties — the AI-oversight regime
- Lowbeer Question — the moral-authority question Lowbeer embodies
- Mediation (a la Gibson)
- Neuromancer — Gibson’s debut, the earlier setting