"The Peripheral" by William Gibson

I thought The Peripheral had some interesting ideas but was a somewhat difficult read. It gets better later in the book after all the main concepts are explained. The dust jacket description helped. I have problems with books that go back and forth in time. This one alternates between a time later this century and one 80 years later.

Too much made up language. Would have helped if there was a glossary at the beginning of the book.

Jackpot -- A world-wide collapse sometime after the first period that killed off 80 percent of the world's population. Not spelled out but apparently a combination of climate change and other things. Mass social breakdown. Very sparse population remaining, supplemented by artificial human bodies, barely animated by AI (artificial intelligence) for show. The survivors are rich, and some of them are very old.

Kleptocracy -- A government or state in which those in power exploit national resources and steal; rule by a thief or thieves. How the far future world is run. Corrupt.

Stub -- People in the future can't physically time travel but they can exchange information with the past, which also allows people to go from the past to the future, as information, and inhabit an artificial body. When the future communicates with the past it alters the past so that it goes off on a time branch they call a stub. It is no longer the past of the future that communicated. The book never explains how this information transfer between future and past works, it uses a program on a mysterious Chinese server (fancy computer) that they don't understand.

Besides creating artificial human bodies, which they can inhabit if they wish, far future people can also create other life forms they can inhabit.

At the beginning of the book the main female character takes a job where she thinks she's providing security in an online virtual game. She's actually operating a flying machine in the future.

Hope that helps.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Peripheral-William-Gibson/dp/0399158448/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1427411168&sr=1-1&keywords=the+peripheral

Nixon wanted to nuke North Vietnam

"If the president had his way," Kissinger growled to aids more than once, "There would be a nuclear war each week!" This may not have been an idle jest. The CIA's top Vietnam specialist, George Carver, reportedly said that in 1969, when the North Koreans shot down a U.S. spy plane, "Nixon became incensed and ordered a tactical nuclear strike.... The Joint Chiefs were alerted and asked to recommend targets, but Kissinger got on the phone to them. They agreed not do anything until Nixon sobered up in the morning."

This particular allegation of flirting with nuclear weaponry is not an isolated one. Nixon had been open to the use of tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam as early as 1954 and as president-elect considered striking "a blow that would both end the war and win it." A Kissinger aide who moved over to the White House, David Young, told a colleague "of the time he was on the phone [listening] when Nixon and Kissinger were talking. Nixon was drunk, and he said, 'Henry, we've got to nuke them.'" -- Anthony Summers, "The Arrogance of Power" p. 372, 2000

Summers quotes Kissinger as saying that it may have been a good thing that Watergate happened because if it hadn't, getting Nixon out of the White House, it might have been something far worse.

Someone wrote that the main accomplishment of the 1960s antiwar movement may have been to keep Nixon from nuking North Vietnam.

http://www.amazon.com/Arrogance-Power-Nixon-Watergate/dp/1842124315/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1426815514&sr=8-2&keywords=the+arrogance+of+power+summers