Agency

William Gibson

Jan 2020 · The Jackpot Trilogy Book 2 · Penguin Random House Audio · Narrated by Lorelei King

About this audiobook

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKING”* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral.
 
William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term “cyberspace” and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is “spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.” Now Gibson is back with Agency—a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events.
 
Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t.
 
Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.
 
*The Boston Globe

Ratings and reviews

This novel has all of the normal trappings of a Gibson novel, the super professional operators, the fantastic prose, bits of humor, and a chase! It is also dull nonsense. Everyone is too good at their job in his worlds now so nothing seems at risk. I feel like the author is a little too enamored with spook biz to make compelling characters that might actually fail. A step down from the last novel, which had the benefit of providing some near future uncertainty and novelty. This novel is Elon Musk solving the world's problems by hosting a party.

A worthwhile sequel to the previous novel! I wasn't sure how he'd approach it exactly, with so much having been seemingly all sorted at the end of the last story. This was a good way to take things, giving us some overlap with the previous stub and a new one. Also, a good audiobook experience! Something I'm grateful for, after having a bad one with another audiobook.

If you want to appreciate the book, don't see The Peripheral series on Amazon Prime til you've read the novels. The script departs in many many ways from the novels. The Amazon series is awesome and I'm dying for the second season. I'm reading the books and they are excellent. The difference is that the distilled story on Amazon Prime is more like brandy and the book is more like a nice sauterne or auslese.

About the author

William Gibson lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife. He is the author of Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral.