Nothing you could really call a nuclear war. Not like that.” Triggered mainly by climate change, the jackpot included: or else were eaten alive by something caused by the big event. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event, after which everybody ran around with guns. The interference from the future, which includes gaming the lottery and manipulating international exchanges, leads to a rapid and radical transformation of the fates of the characters in the stub that may help them avoid, at least on their timeline, the slow-moving apocalypse called the “jackpot.”Īs twenty-second-century Wilf Netherton explains to twenty-first-century Flynne Fisher, the jackpot was “no one thing”: “multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. In the novel, characters living in twenty-second-century London-a heavily surveilled city run by phenomenally wealthy kleptocrats and mysterious guilds-interact in a stub they have created with characters living in a mid-twenty-first-century Appalachian town whose economy is based mainly on manufacturing, or “building,” illicit drugs. In an attempt to help me assuage this fear and sort through my sense of disorientation, I decided to reread The Peripheral, William Gibson’s 2014 novel that imagines a twenty-second century in which a powerful quantum computer rumored to be located in China has enabled the creation of “stubs,” or alternative timelines. For months I lay awake at night and in the still-dark hours of the morning in terror. The real world was elsewhere, on the other timeline we had split away from, where Hillary Clinton had been elected president and, though things were hardly great, we at least weren’t hurtling toward the nuclear apocalypse I was certain that our president-elect was eventually going to stumble into. At the same time, I felt that what was happening was unreal.

Suddenly, I could see clearly the country as it really is for the first time: systematically racist, and with a sizable population determined to maintain white supremacist and misogynist hierarchies. After the 2016 presidential election, I had the uncanny feeling that we had veered into a different, darker timeline and were hurtling away from the future I had expected.

William gibson the jackpot trilogy