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.
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