World building in the first two episodes.

The Peripheral lands on our screens shorn of some of what is in the book of the same name (written by William Gibson). For those of you who don’t know, Gibson is most famous for writing the seminal cyberpunk work Neuromancer, published all the way back in 1984.

The Peripheral handles many of the same themes although, perhaps, not as garishly draped in neon and body horror. If we no longer think of the future of humanity as one where we’re more chrome than flesh, our cyberpunk ambitions are no less realised through mobile phones, smart watches, the internet of things and facial recognition technologies.

Gibson has suggested that we are way past the jumping off point of trans humanism – it’s just that we haven’t noticed it because the transition happened a long time ago.

Gibson has also suggested we’re already living in a world in which general artificial intelligences exist – they’re called corporations. Certainly the law recognises corporates as persons able to sue and act and demand protection as if they were people like you and me walking down the street.

As if to underline this point, the US Supreme Court is about to hear a case where they’re expected to grant corporations the right to sue striking workers. To put it another way they’re granting you the right to sue your own arm for complaining about you putting it in that boiling water over there.

This leads to another point; a person’s agency is enacted by changing the world. Changing the world impacts other people and how we live together as citizens is the very origin of the word politics. With some steps missed out for brevity, if Corporates are persons then they are also political beings.

It’s fair to say these ideas are embodied in Gibson’s writing. They’re also largely missing from The Peripheral TV series. At least so far.

The show starts by cutting the Chekov’s Gun from the opening of the novel and jumping straight to the rest of the story. In my preview of the series I wrote about how this works, about how the adaptation has found some much needed humanity to thread into the overall story. This has, I think, largely elevated the show above the novel in terms of how compelling it feels to engage with what is happening. The stakes are clear, human and immanent.

What that doesn’t mean is these political ideas are lost to us. Gibson’s concerns with liberal capitalism, the ubiquity of technology whose impact we can’t and don’t understand as well as his concern with the human caught up in the middle of this, remain.

Flynne is the eye of the storm here. Her brother Burton already broken by his encounters with a world in which he has no intrinsic value except what can be extracted from him by much more powerful entities.

Alongside this we have a stark image of impoverished rural America. One where farms are owned by mega-corporations who need no staff, with no healthcare system to speak of and with definitely no education worth having there are no jobs available except for those who started life in the right places.

The show is packed with ideas – time travel, climate catastrophe, nanotechnology, information warfare – and it absolutely questions how technology impinges and threatens to violate our ideas about what it means to be this body, here, now.

Each of these elements alone could form a full show in other hands even if we’ve seen many of them before.

What feels so special to me, and what works so well in the novel, is how these ideas are combined to create a world which feels real. Regardless of the clichés about capitalism, kleptocracies, oligarchs and how technology inequality is as much of a problem as income inequality, the show brings them together into a coherent whole.

And this coherency has a message – that we let other people make these decisions for us at our peril. We let others control the stories we tell at our peril and, regardless of what action we might take to keep control of these elements, we can’t do it alone. This isn’t a paean to libertarian individualism, it’s about how we need each other.

If you want to change the world, the model is not Elon Musk, it’s the scientists, engineers, the mathematicians, the cleaners, the lawyers, the craftspeople and the other myriad contributors to an industry who make the world possible.

It’s also where the danger lies. Gibson ascribes humanity fearsome agency but he also outlines how its limits deceive us. The first lie we believe is that we can achieve anything. The second is that when this first lie is uncovered we cannot bring ourselves to believe that the world will act without any regard for what we want.

Disaster can and does strike no matter what we hope for. Sometimes we do everything right and still fail.

All of this is there in the show, in the writing and the way the world is built on screen. From the lavish parties in the future London, the simmering feudalism, the desperate scrabbling to access healthcare, the abuse of soldiers who agreed to assignments whose persistent risks they couldn’t understand.

And as with all science fiction, the show talks to the world we’re in now. Talks about the disaster of letting profit guide who lives and dies, about the hollowing out effect on community and countless lives of the opioid crisis on the US.

It talks to us of what it means to be left behind. Both for the rich and the poor because there are different ways of remaining when others have moved on, and none of them are good.

Episodes 1 and 2 build a world split by 70 years of history but one thing we learn is that, even separated by time and disaster, nothing ever changes. If America is transactional now, London is transactional then. The political settlements may appear different – democracy versus kleptocracy – but the show’s point is that for too many people there’s no different between a democracy caught by unfettered capitalism and kleptocracy.

Lastly, the show deals with class and does so explicitly. Every single one of our protagonists are working class.

Wilf is a refugee adopted by the wealthy but always judged as an outsider, as someone who cannot measure up except by becoming a mirror of his ‘betters’. Flynne and Burton are solidly working class and, despite all the hype of the American Dream, know they have no chance for mobility because, at best, they belong to other people as property and at worst they are discarded as trash. The system doesn’t see them as people who can progress or thrive but as chattels to be used and disposed of.

The story is presented to us as these characters being buffeted by currents over which they have no control. Their main activity is survival. Purely from a storytelling point of view it’s fantastic to see people surviving as their act of defiance, as their act of winning. There are no Mensch here, changing the world by the force of their will – what we have are people who are the equal of anyone, taking the chances that come their way to level that playing field.

The Peripheral is full of politics – you just need to know where to look. If so much of it feels slight or invisible it may just be that the concerns of the main characters are not ones that have ever pressed in on us with their precarity or their weight of uncertainty.

If that truly is the case then you might just be one of the kleptocracy.

I’m really keen to see how this world continues to operate. It’s set its rules clearly and I expect the players here will use those rules against it.