Agency

Some beautiful passages but too few and far between A retread of ideas from NEUROMANCER and THE PERIPHERAL. I recommend avoiding this book and instead enjoying Gibson’s earlier PATTERN RECOGNITION. This is only for superfans. The dozen poetic gem passages threaded throughout the middle of the book don’t quite make up for the overpopulated, quotidian remainder, like a Downtown Abbey dress rehearsal performed by redditors on the spectrum, endlessly strapping intro nylon duffles, tyvek tarps, and juggling chargers.

** spoiler alert ** Read Peripheral first or you will spend most of this book scratching your head and wondering what is going on. Having been introduced previously to several of the characters, meeting them again was pleasurable, and I didn’t have any difficulty with the time streams. This novel introduces UNISS/Eunice, a self-sufficient AI in 2017, monitored from future streams/stubs (see what I mean?) by mostly hobbyists and PR professionals. Eunice assists Verity, the app-whisperer (a UX tester, apparently) in escaping from the very employers who brought her in to “test” Eunice in her first incarnation as a digital assistant. As with all self-improving AI (or so I’ve read), things quickly get beyond the control of the corporation. It’s Eunice’s game now and everyone else — especially Verity — is just along for the ride. Literally. There is a lot of riding around, or she is sitting perfectly still while in another time stream her avatar is riding around. It will be interesting to see if Mr Gibson writes his next book about Eunice.

** spoiler alert ** Read Peripheral first or you will spend most of this book scratching your head and wondering what is going on. Having been introduced previously to several of the characters, meeting them again was pleasurable, and I didn’t have any difficulty with the time streams. This novel introduces UNISS/Eunice, a self-sufficient AI in 2017, monitored from future streams/stubs (see what I mean?) by mostly hobbyists and PR professionals. Eunice assists Verity, the app-whisperer (a UX tester, apparently) in escaping from the very employers who brought her in to “test” Eunice in her first incarnation as a digital assistant. As with all self-improving AI (or so I’ve read), things quickly get beyond the control of the corporation. It’s Eunice’s game now and everyone else — especially Verity — is just along for the ride. Literally. There is a lot of riding around, or she is sitting perfectly still while in another time stream her avatar is riding around. It will be interesting to see if Mr Gibson writes his next book about Eunice.

Gibson goes through different focuses with different series. The Sprawl trilogy was all ideas, The Bridge trilogy was world building, Blue Ant was all character driven. I think the Peripheral (Time Travel) world is all story. The world is interesting, the characters are good, but the story just goes and I'm really enjoying that element of it.

I have read just about every book and story William Gibson has written. I've taught one of his novels and one of his art projects. I follow him carefully on Twitter. I'm definitely a fan. Which is why I found Agency to be so disappointing. To sum up: Agency is a sequel to Peripheral. They posit a science fictional world with two tracks. In both books one track takes place in the near future (effectively the present for Agency), while the other takes place more than 100 years from now. In that timeline the world has been gutted by a series of disasters wryly dubbed "the Jackpot." A kind of gangster aristocracy, the "klept," runs the world. Someone has discovered how to send information back in time, the act of which breaks off a parallel world, a "stub," with its own, alternative path to follow. Peripheral involved the future timeline intervening in the one close to our word. Agency follows suit. The plot concerns the creation (in the timeline very close to ours) of a new AI that looks fairly sentient. It contacts our protagonist, Verity, and sends her on various adventures. Meanwhile, characters in the future reach out to Verity and the AI to try making that world a bit better. On the positive side this sounds fascinating. I enjoyed Peripheral very much and was happy to return to that world. I appreciated, too, that many of the leading and most powerful characters are women, as well as black. This is an evolution for Gibson, and targeted at changing American readers' tastes. On the other hand... Agency's story is very, very weak. The present-day plot mostly involves people (including one named Virgil; seriously?) hauling Verity around to different locations in various locations. She never develops as a character. Someone calls her an "app whisperer" early on but that leads to nothing. Her attachment to the AI is just about her defining trait. An antagonist appears in the form of a firm called Cursion, but that's scarcely sketched out, having no real force in the text. There's a political subplot involving a Cold War-ish nuclear war crisis, but it's very lightly sketched - really just hinted at - and has neither emotional nor political heft. You might notice I'm not bothering with spoilers. That's because they wouldn't be worth it. There are too few surprises and too little to reveal. The future world is even fainter to discern. We mostly see characters from the first book as they try to help Verity and the AI. There's a single subplot about a klept threatening Lowbeer that is remarkably straightforward and, again, very light on the ground. There's a tantalizing hint about a character who makes hell-stubs (7-8) (was this in the first book? I can't recall) but that drops away. Characters don't change or receive depth. The interesting politics of the world get at best cursory treatment. We do get to spend time in Lowbeer's cool car. I know from Twitter and interviews that Gibson rewrote the novel after Trump's election. He wanted to react to what he saw as shocking and horrible. We can see a sign of that in the fact that Verity's world is actually an alternate history from our own. The Brexit vote failed, Trump lost the election, and an unnamed women - clearly Hillary Clinton - is now the American president. I read this about the book before starting it, and was expecting some alt.history development. Instead, that aspect of the setting is weirdly invisible. It's hard to see any differences between our worlds, other than the handful of mentions about the nuclear crisis, which is, as I said, barely present at all. One scene points to a painting showing Clinton and Trump during a debate (129-130) and that's about it. Is Verity's race and gender supposed to indicate the difference somehow, pointing to a world where a black woman can be the plot's lead? That argument isn't ever made. One reviewer found the title to be ironic since our point of view characters have so little of it. Verity is essentially cargo for the book, shuttled around without much choice. Netherton is a go-between and does what he's told without much demur. When I read an author's later work I sometimes look for the ways it addresses themes that appeared in earlier projects. Agency does revisit early Gibson themes. An AI coming to life is what Neuromancer was anchored on, back in 1984. We get a tip of the hat to that great book with a minor character referencing a wheeler-dealer named Finn (358). A mix of criminal, legit business, and shadowy government operations has appeared pretty much in all of his writing. Gibson's habit of carefully identifying fashion and decor reaches something of a pinnacle here. In fact, I found myself paying more attention to what he said about storage units and clothing that about plot or character, which is both unlike me and not a good sign. Other notes: -I'm curious about how Gibson went about identifying characters by race. There isn't much besides that kind of indexing, although the AI sometimes speaks in African American Vernacular English ("You the app whisperer," 14). -the book is weirdly lacking in romance or sex. Verity's story touches on this briefly when she once encounters her ex's new girlfriend. Our future point of view character, Wilf, loves his wife, but this is largely based on being roommates, plus just one scene where we learn the wife is excited by clothes Wilf hates. Quite a change from previous Gibson stories. Why do I give this three stars and not two? Because I admire the author very much. Because it's always a pleasure to spend time in Gibson's prose., offering coinages like "macro-canapé." (166) A rest area, she supposed, if your idea of rest involved a ghostly acrylic occasional chair, beneath a precariously tall, worryingly anamorphic floor lamp. (177) Lowbeer... abruptly appear[ed], upswept white hair backlit by the dim carmine glow of a Denisovian sex crevasse. (100)Yet these appear less often than in Periphery. And because there are some nice touches, like a nearly mythical attack on a gangster and a creepy privacy tech based on dancing girl-bots. And also because I'm glad Gibson, almost alone among contemporary writers, actually cares about the long, long American war on terror.