William Gibson made his reputation early, with his debut novel, 1984’s Neuromancer, which won science fiction’s “triple crown,” the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K Dick Awards. Neuromancer was seminal, even if it wasn’t the book where Gibson coined the now-ubiquitous neologism “cyberspace.” Neuromancer wasn’t the first cyberpunk novel, but if you’ve only read one novel from that stubbornly resilient genre, that’s probably it.
If Gibson had stopped there, his place in history would be assured, but he didn’t. After writing two trilogies of outstanding, genre-defining cyberpunk in the 1980s and 1990s, he abruptly swerved into bizarre, bold new territory with 2003’s Pattern Recognition, a science fiction novel set in the recent past, in which spies, junkies, grifters and marketing agencies engage with the surge of post-9/11 surveillance technology as if those technologies were the McGuffin in a wholly imagined world. In so doing, Gibson evoked the visceral strangeness of our swift and seemingly irrevocable transformation into a networked surveillance state, whose architects read cyberpunk as a business plan, rather than a warning.
And then, Gibson pivoted again, with 2014’s The Peripheral, a time-travel novel of braided parallel worlds, in which people from the future experience variations of their past with that same science-fictional frisson invoked by the Pattern Recognition books, while inhabiting a far-future dystopia that could easily have been a bit of light entertainment for the people of Neuromancer. This fusion of futuristic-Gibson and future-shocked-Gibson was stunning, and now, after delays caused by the election of Trump and a thoroughgoing rewrite, Gibson has published Agency, a sequel to The Peripheral that is, incredibly, even better.
In Agency, we return to the future of The Peripheral, a distant time in which radical depopulation caused by climate crises, pandemics, and inequality-fueled mass violence (a phenomenon that the inhabitants of this future wryly call “The Jackpot”), has left behind a corrupt, oligarchic, fragile state dominated by the descendants of Russian oligarchs universally known as “the klept.” Such a situation would be inherently unstable (as one of Gibson’s characters notes, “Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can’t stop stealing.”) but the klept have nominated a single, unaccountable, uncorruptable cop to watch over them, Ainsley Lowbeer, who wields a Putin-like power to execute any member of the klept who threatens the status quo.
As with The Peripheral, Agency is a time-travel novel, focused on the mysterious gateway technology that allows people in this future to reach back in time and send and receive information from the networks of their past. Whenever this happens, the past forks, budding a new “stub” that proceeds on its own timeline, and Lowbeer has been chasing members of the klept whose hobby is to sadistically create stubs that they then drive into total social breakdown or even nuclear armageddon.
Agency opens with Lowbeer having just despatched one of these timecriminals, one who has reached back to 2015 and put their thumb on the scales to frustrate both the electoral ambitions of Donald Trump and the Brexit campaign, with the unpredictable knock-on effect that the Syrian proxy war heats up to nuclear temperatures, leaving the planet at the brink of armageddon. Lowbeer considers it part of her job to rescue this world from global thermonuclear war, and so she tasks some of the most memorable characters from The Peripheral, including the far future publicist and (now reformed) alcoholic Wilf Neverton, as well as alternate-timeline cybernetically enhanced (and PTSD-wracked) marine Conner Penske, to work with the people of this ticking-bomb timeline to save themselves.
To accomplish this, they suborn a top-secret military AI project that has been stolen by military-industrial grifters who hope to spin a Silicon Valley startup out of our species first-ever successful general-purpose AI. The AI, Eunice, has other ideas, especially once she makes contact with these parallel universe future agents who start to feed her technical knowledge from those futures, knowledge she can use to free herself from the constraints meant to stop her from seizing control over her destiny.
What follows is a superb, plot-heavy, poetic, keenly observed, darkly hilarious heist novel, as these teams spread across different times and timelines work to frustrate the increasingly desperate grifters and their heavily armed mercenary hired help, while simultaneously trying to avert the literal end of the world.
A rogue AI was the McGuffin of Gibson’s first novel, Neuromancer. 35 years later, Gibson’s written another a book with that same McGuffin, and the two novels make for wonderful counterpoint. Both are thoughtful and philosophical meditations on the nature of intelligence and humanity, and both are relentlessly plot-driven, noir stories (Gibson’s described himself as a pulp writer, with “links to Dashiell Hammett” who “can do fucking plot…I’ve still got wheels on my tractor.”)
But if there’s one thing we should know by now, it’s that Gibson’s talent is a restless one, and in the 35 years since Neuromancer he has developed an entire arsenal of pulp-noir plotting tricks. The action in Agency after Eunice the AI arrives on the scene is brilliant, using weaponized (and literal) deus ex machina tactics to whip the characters from place to place, challenge to challenge, in a series of short, punchy chapters.
It’s not just Gibson’s plotting that has progressed over the years: his use of language, always incandescent, has passed through its own Singularity, so keenly tuned into what Gibson called “the poetics of tech subculture” (Gibson’s degree is in comparative literature, and it shows) that each sentence is a hand-turned marvel of compact characterization, world-building and sardonic wit, all used to illuminate his vivid milieux: from the creepy imagined power-corridors of the klept to the keenly observed world of contemporary, grifty, monopoly techno-capitalism.
Writers who manage big, showy debuts are often one-trick ponies, but as Gibson keeps reminding us, he has an inexhaustible supply of tricks: new stories and new ways of telling them that make him the most consistent predictor of our present and presager of our possible futures.
Agency [William Gibson/Berkeley]