Decent but not outstanding audio program. Time travel and forked reality, World War 2. Not really worth the read unless you're particularly into the forked-timeline and WW2 themes, but not really bad. ( )

Archangel has a clever premise but I found myself wanting more explication. It seemed like Gibson was going for intrigue but at the expense of engaging with the plot.

Published after Gibson's The Peripheral and sharing many broad points of its premise, I'd assumed Archangel was a spin-off with minimal or perhaps no overlapping characters. Turns out the germ for Archangel came first, though Gibson admits it underwent significant revision from its origin as a television pitch (never developing even so far as a proper treatment).

In any case, there are strong parallels: split timelines and the ability to communicate between them via live feeds. In the case of Archangel, it's also possible physically to relocate to a split timeline (the question of a return is moot given the scenario explored). The provenance of the technology allowing all this, however, is radically different between the novel and this limited series comic, as are the geopolitical circumstances. It would appear Archangel's future world also experienced a Jackpot event, so if they are not the same worlds perhaps one is a stub of the other? Perhaps our timeline is a stub of one of those, no reason to believe ours is the primary branch, and I think that realisation is part of Gibson's point. Archangel's trigger event is of a piece with that strain of industrial-military incompetence so prevalent in our world.

Full colour throughout and in a style I vaguely connect with vintage Lost Patrol or Haunted Tank comics I came across in the 1970s and early 80s, Berlin 1945 looks in permanent brownout.

synopsis | A secret U.S. government project sends the current Vice President back to 1945 Berlin, attempting to steer events toward a more desirable future -- presumably one avoiding the nuclear holocaust referenced in the opening panels and briefly explained later in the story. The project is compromised by fifth columnists who see in this secret project only a repeat doomsday on another stage. Events play out in both 1945 and 2016, and seeded throughout are references to recognisable bits from our world: pulp fiction, Allies-Axis backroom deals, blackmarket necessities. Like much Gibson some of the most intriguing bits are offscreen. ( )

Gibson's newest book is a graphic novel. In a 2016 that is not ours, the world's great cities are smashed and radioactive. The US government has been moved to Montana, and scientists there have built a form of time machine - a "splitter", which can reach into the past to create a branching timeline. People can be sent back, into a past filled with new possibily, to create a new future, separate from the disastrous one they left.

The denizens of the radioactive 2016 have sharply divergent views on what this renewed world should become, and so two rival expeditions travel back to the 1945 they, and we, remember, each determined to bring about their preferred alternate history by any means necessary.

In August 1945, in the ruins of Berlin, British intelligence officer Naomi Givens must make sense of a film showing the crash of an aircraft unlike any in the world, a plane that appeared out of thin air. The Soviets have the wreckage, but she has the still-living pilot, and samples of materials no one in 1945 knows how to make. Working with an American counterpart, she must understand a secret war over the future.

Graphic novels are group projects; there are 12 names on the title page, artists, writers, and editors. I'm familiar only with Gibson. The panels are drawn realistically, although in action sequences the choices of views and viewing angles sometimes make it a bit difficult to see who is doing what. The book presents a splendid vision of a noir Berlin.

Thoughts of how history can branch at crucial moments are on the minds of many of us these days, and Gibson's book is an extremely timely investigation of the idea. ( )