If The Peripheral is to be believed, we’re all pretty much doomed.

Based on the William Gibson novel of the same name, the new Amazon series finds Flynne, a young computer-savvy woman played by Chloë Grace Moretz, unwittingly bouncing between the bleak near-future and the even bleaker distant future. She’s been enlisted by her cyber GI brother to test some new mystery tech, and the pair quickly realize they’ve become embroiled in a thriller for the ages. The series is rife with outlandish inventions, brutal fights, and faceless cyborgs, plus local no-goods, hints of romance, and even some good old-fashioned drone warfare. Not enough dystopia for you? The Peripheral also features behemoth sculptural air cleaners hovering over a staggeringly empty future version of London, just in case you weren’t freaked out enough already.

As with all things Gibson, the vision in The Peripheral was meticulously crafted—a blessing for readers, but a challenge for executive producers Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan to translate to the screen. To do it, the pair—already experts at crafting future dystopias as creators of HBO’s *Westworld—*worked with showrunner Scott Smith to reframe the story for the show and craft props and sets that nodded to both the future and the present. WIRED talked to Joy and Nolan about digitally creating “giga-size” carbon collectors, finding human connection amid all the tech, and the joy of a well thought-out set of rules.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: The Peripheral is the first project that came out of your recent overall deal with Amazon. Was it something that you brought to the table or was it something that they’d been kicking around?

Lisa Joy: It started with Vincenzo Natali, this wonderful director we’d worked with on Westworld. He has been friends with William Gibson for a long time and he brought us the book, which we immediately fell in love with.

Speaking of William Gibson, what was it like to work with him? How involved was he, and how collaborative was that process?

Jonathan Nolan: I was personally incredibly excited because I started reading William Gibson's books when I was 14. I read Count Zero first and then worked my way back toward Neuromancer and then forward again. I was completely flabbergasted by his ability to conjure whole worlds.

As a futurism dork, too, I was always fascinated with technology. When I was an even younger kid, I lived in London and I grew up watching a show called Tomorrow's World, which I think is still on the air. They’d show you all the crazy things coming down the pipe. And then here's this author William Gibson who, on every single page of those books, there is not just an idea, but a fully developed device or technology. I mean, this is the guy who gave us the term “cyberspace.” He had the whole damn thing laid out.

So as a 14-year-old in suburban Chicago, Gibson’s books were like a portal into another universe or the future. In some cases, kind of a dystopian, gritty future, but a completely fully imagined vision of it. I was fascinated.

I know how influential Bill's work has been on my own work. I started working in film and TV over 20 years ago, and I've watched over the years as series after series and film after film have taken liberally—as I have in my own work—from Gibson's work.

The Peripheral actually sits a little more close to the bone for Bill, too, because he grew up in West Virginia. When you're reading The Peripheral, it’s as close to near-futurism as Gibson has come in his work, really. I would say it’s only about three minutes to the future. It’s uncanny, really. We've been developing this book now for a couple of years, and every year the world gets a little closer to what he imagined in The Peripheral.

You should ask him for stock tips.

Nolan: We've pumped him for information about what's going to come with the next election cycle, but he refuses to tell us. His lips are sealed. But it has been a delight and a pleasure and an honor to collaborate with someone who was and remains so influential in my work.

Joy: He is really lovely. I just want to go to dinner with him, have a couple of drinks, and nerd out about crazy theories. That’s my long game. I just want to be friends with him.

Nolan: It’s sad, because most of the show’s development and shooting was during the pandemic, we couldn’t get to him in-person most of the time. We had to conduct most of our relationship via email.

Joy: I’m coming after him now. The doors are open.

It is a little meta that you were making a project that was in part about a pandemic during an actual pandemic. It would make you think, “What does he know?”

Joy: It was very weird. It's also heartening in some ways too, though.

Gibson is a prophet of the future, and he's always been so accurate. Looking at the way he portrays the near-future setting Clanton in the present, essentially, and the community there, it's also a type of roadmap to fortitude and how to survive. More than survive, even. It’s about how much community means, and how much brotherhood and family mean.

There's such a warmth to this book, in particular in Flynne’s story and the story of her family and friends, that I find it to be an antidote. So truly, when we were going through the pandemic and filming this and adapting it, in some ways it was inspiring. It picked me up, because it was like, “OK, people have gone through difficult times. You have to rally around the people that matter to you to get through it.”

There are parts of the show that differ from the book in terms of structure and details. How did you broach that conversation and say, “We love your story, but here’s what we need to change if we want to see it onscreen.”

Joy: He saw it all coming. He was like, “Yeah, I knew you were going to do that.”

The great thing about working with an artist and writer as talented and kind as Gibson is that he understands the artistic process. He understands that making a series is fundamentally different from reading a book. There are things that have to evolve and change for the medium. He has been such a booster of us making the best version of The Peripheral that we can for TV.

You two are sort of worldbuilding experts, having created whole systems and structures both here and in Westworld. What do you think is important in terms of worldbuilding? If you’re setting a show in the future, is it important to have ties to the present for viewers to hold on to?

Nolan: I think the most important thing in worldbuilding—and it doesn't really matter if you're building the future, the present, or the past—but every story has to be constructed around a universe of characters and a set of rules.

That's what I love so much about Gibson's work. When I first read it, everything rang true. It was fully imagined, and you could tell he thought about it. It might have might not have been presented on the page, but you could feel all of the thought that had gone into, “If you had a technology like this, what impact would it have on society? How would it work? Would you have discomfort from it? Would it create a ripple effect?”

How do you do that with something like the park in Westworld?

Nolan: When we started with Westworld, the first thing we did was make an org chart of how their corporation would work and who would be in charge of what. Did it look like a TV series or did it look like a video game company? Who would have what responsibilities? How would they put safeguards in place for the characters?

What about The Peripheral?

Nolan: When Scott Smith came in to do the adaptation of The Peripheral, we'd been wanting to work with him for a very long time. He’s an extremely talented writer, and he was able to conjure exactly the sort of world that feels fully imagined and fully lived in. All the relationships have been thought through very, very carefully. And so Scott brought his own inimitable worldbuilding qualities to the narrative.

It’s nice to hear that you do all that work, because as a viewer it’s always incredibly frustrating when you get to episode 11 or whatever and think, “No, this contradicts episode two. It makes no sense.” And don’t even get me started on differences in subsequent seasons …

Nolan: That's the thing. You have to remind yourself every day that the audience, if they love your show—and you want to make shows people love—is going to invest as much into it as you are. So you better have done your homework when you're creating these massive shows. When they run for six or seven seasons, it's challenging, for sure, but I think if you care it’s evident.

In some sense, it feels like shows and movies about the future can be a bit of a Möbius strip in terms of influencing culture. As in, if I’m creating a piece of tech now, I might model it after something from Blade Runner or The Peripheral, and then those works of fiction become sort of self-fulfilling prophecies. Do you think at all about how media about the future shapes the actual future, or shapes where we think we’re going?

Joy: The thing is, when we're thinking about the future and how to evolve, we’re looking at the continuum of the world and how style evolves. A lot of things recur. Nothing is wholly original.

When you get a new tech it can revolutionize design in really interesting ways, and we're beginning to see those in the fashion industry even now. We just saw the spray-on dress on Bella Hadid during Fashion Week. Those types of technologies feel very Kryptonian, but the people who create these new looks and the writers who are pontificating about these new looks are drinking from the same well. Do you know what I mean? We're looking at the same influences and extrapolating from that what might come.

Totally.

Joy: So yes, entertainment does steer some trends, but it's also informed by the same thing that is driving innovation. Everything dovetails in an interesting way because it's based on the kind of substance of the tech that we see being possible in the future.

Right now, I'm so interested in architecture and fashion and design from the standpoint of new technologies, like 3D printing, and new concerns like environmental conservatism and how to be more intelligent about using resources. I think that the whole world is going to have to focus on some of these issues as a natural part of human evolution and it will necessarily lead to new innovation. So we're just kind of all hypothesizing based on the same data.

Nolan: Fiction is humanity talking to itself and postulating about its own future. That feedback loop is hopefully a virtuous one, although most futurism seems to be dystopian. I don't know what that means. Nothing good, I would imagine. But I think it's us having a conversation with ourselves about where we want to go as a civilization, as individuals, technologically and culturally.

I try not to put too much emphasis or too much importance on what we do, but I think it is fascinating to be part of that conversation.

There is a bit in the show where Flynne’s contact in the future sends the formula for a 3D-printed drug that helps her mother, and it seems really mind-blowing, but there are researchers looking into how to 3D-print organs and all of that. It’s all theoretically within the realm of possibility.

Joy: When I started my career on a show called Pushing Daisies, we were already talking about 3D printed meat. So many years later, that's still a part of the conversation and a part of futurism, probably because it's possible.

We're all just looking at the same thing and studying it together. Part of being a writer is keeping your ear to the ground, watching and observing, and letting what's happening in the world present itself to you.

Lastly, there’s a lot of new tech for the series, including these massive air cleaners in London and this crazy sort of sonic gun. How did you imagine those, and who did you work with to make them a reality?

Nolan: We were fortunate here to work with Jan Roelfs and Jay Worth, our longtime visual effects partners in crime with whom we've had a very long and fun relationship imagining how you would bring these things to life. And then with them came an army of artists, designers, and VFX artists trying to figure these things out.

Honestly, that's the fun bit. Shortly after bringing us the book, Vincenzo got with a series of graphic artists and developed sort of a lookbook and a set of ideas for how the series could work, which included a visual idea that then informed the narrative of the carbon sequestration towers, which are the giant sculptural towers evident in a lot of the shows. The idea behind those is that the carbon sequestration tower is using the captured carbon to create art on a grand civic scale.

Those sorts of ideas are informed in part by the narrative and in part by, “Here's a beautiful visual idea.” Why would you have this monumental giga-size sculpture in London? Once you come up with the answer underneath it, that sort of binds it all together.

I think those towers are one of the most graceful and beautiful touches in this series, and that idea emerged at the intersection of artists, writers, directors, and production designers all thinking together about what our cities are going to look like in a few generations.

That’s the absolute most fun part of working on the series for me, really. I mean, obviously the ideas, the characters, the themes, but I love getting to be futurists with an infinite R&D budget. Whatever nonsense the team can dream up we can implement immediately. Then, as creators, we just have to start to run the experiment about what all of it does culturally and societally.