And an antagonist of Neuromancer is an unfathomably powerful corporate family that has escaped earth’s gravity to a private orbital villa and extended their lives with genetic engineering and cryogenic freezing. There’s a grim recurring joke in the source novel about how the only place to buy things in the future is a single everything-store conglomerate.

This ambivalence would add a funny flavor to any streaming adaptation of The Peripheral, but it’s particularly ironic that it’s playing on Amazon. On page two of his first novel, Neuromancer, he alludes to a world where not getting plastic surgery makes you strange, “an age of affordable beauty” that neatly prefigures our current era of the nearly-universal veneers, cosmetic injectables, and inexpensive hair transplants that have subtly changed the way our famous people look on screen. The archetypal Gibson protagonist is a freelancer swept along on a tidal wave of morally ambiguous money and power, which is probably how it feels to make TV right now. And if you go back and read some of his books, there is unsurprisingly a lot that feels eerily relevant to the current state of mass culture. That “something” tends to be a quietly white-hot critique of our current financial and technological superstructure. And the fact that the show was shaped by many of the forces he’s long explored in his work makes for pretty fascinating viewing. The adaptation is maybe not a great TV show, but it's deeply of a piece with Gibson's vision of a pretty crummy future. The drought is now over: The Peripheral has been adapted into an 8-episode series, and the first two are streaming today on Amazon Prime. This is not for lack of trying: Gibson spent some largely unfruitful years working for Hollywood, and while his script for Alien 3 was never turned into a move, it has become so widely circulated as dweeb samizdat that it’s been both legitimately published and turned into a novel by another writer. In spite of his influence, Gibson has had less success getting his own work on screen, with the exception of the 1995 Keanu Reeves–led boondoggle Johnny Mnemonic, based on the story of the same name. As Zach Baron put it when profiling him for GQ in 2014, ahead of the release of his novel The Peripheral, “His work has permeated the culture to the point that even he can’t tell what’s his and what isn’t.” Since the early 1980s, he’s imagined the over-connected future we’re living in, or at least hurtling towards, and influenced countless books and movies while doing it. William Gibson’s thrilling, grimly-detailed novels have made him a titan within science fiction, but the uncanny prescience of his stories have also made him a major figure in the wider world-the secret source code for everything from your iPhone to your favorite jacket.

William gibson novel the peripheral