Guess I’d better start updating this site, since I’m now including it in my Tor.com author bio.
Anyway, my review of The Peripheral is up now over there—the part that’s safe to read if you’re spoiler-averse. I ended up writing an extra 2000 or so spoiler-rich words on it as well, which will go up later; there was a lot I wanted to say about that book, but I couldn’t do it and avoid spoilers at the same time.
I’m not really the kind of person who screams “OMG SPOILERS” at people, and I do believe that there are statutes of limitations on the things that can be reasonably said to have run out. (Darth Vader, Rosebud, etc.) But I actually feel pretty strongly about not spoiling The Peripheral; not because it has some kind of “he was dead all along” twist at the end, but because Gibson pulls off a rather elegant narrative trick that clicked nicely for me about a quarter of the way in.
Which I guess by some people’s standards is early enough in the book to not count as a spoiler—but to me, one of the great pleasures of reading The Peripheral was arriving at that trick on my own and realizing exactly what he was up to. The slow, deliberate pace of exposition (not just with the abovementioned turn in the narrative, but also with the explanation of an event in The Peripheral‘s future history) is one of the really lovely things about it, and I don’t want to ruin that fun for anyone else.
ETA: And here’s the full spoiler part of the review. Considering how much of what’s in there has already been laid out by reviewers at the Verge, BoingBoing, etc., my scruples on this matter seem slightly quaint … but so be it.