Agency

By: William Gibson

Narrated by: Lorelei King

Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins

Publisher's summary

An instant New York Times best seller

"One of the most visionary, original, and quietly influential writers currently working" (The Boston Globe) returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times best-selling 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.

©2018 William Gibson (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Engaging, thought-provoking and delightful... [Gibson] can always be counted on to show us our contemporary milieu rendered magical by his unique insights, and a future rendered inhabitable by his wild yet disciplined imagination." (The Washington Post)

"Superb... Each sentence is a hand-turned marvel of compact characterization, world-building and sardonic wit, all used to illuminate his vivid milieus.... Gibson has an inexhaustible supply of tricks, new stories and new ways of telling them that make him the most consistent predictor of our present, contextualizer of our pasts and presager of our possible futures." (Los Angeles Times)

"An immersive thriller, fueled by an intelligent, empathetic imagination." (The Boston Globe)

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the thinnest story Gibson has written in a while. Really good writing, but still not much happens.

It’s alright

This story does not have the heart or the danger of the previous iteration. It reads like a quest log of a mildly entertaining video game. Go here to do that now go here to do that then go back to where you started and then the novel ended.

I guess my final thought was, ok, well I guess it’s over then.

There are a couple minor detracting quirks, but...

...I'm still sorta in love with it. If you haven't read the Peripheral, read that first.

There's an emotional softness, here, that doesn't exist in Gibson's early novels. The latter of which were, as is "requisite" of cyberpunk, addictively and intriguingly gritty.

Don't get me wrong. Agency has grit. It has a great pace, and artful unfolding of narrative and character development. Yet it's paired with sentimental warmth you start to see in the Blue Ant series.

It's badass, it's fun, and you probably won't want it to end.

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Other critical reviews I've read aren't wrong. They have valid points. But, they're kinda hyperbolic, at the same time. What can you say? Gibson has set the bar high for himself, over the past few decades.
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But it's still Gibson It the best of ways.

I kept waiting for the plot twist...

that never came. I was expecting some kind of new interesting twist, and kept looking for it until the very end.

it is a good story it is a good story if you enjoy it for what it is. but it's not an epic Gibson.

Agency. Well done follow up to The Peripheral

Awesome story. Great characters. Hillary Clinton as a heroic figure was laughable. Excellent use of alternate history

Fine trading, poor story falls apart

Loved Peripheral, but Agency starts out strong and then dribbles out. Our two protagonists do nothing but ask questions and get carried from place to place. Ending is like, what, really? I’ll pass on the next book.

It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

Consolidating a concept

This book follows on from Peripheral, and knowing that book helps, but it does not repeat those actions. Picking up the thread after the other ends this book carves out its own action.

If you're willing to adjust to the plot points then this book has its own elements that revisit the Idoru theme of self-aware AI. It isn't exactly that older world, I think Gibson is taking advantage of the changes that would facilitate his heroine's development. It feels like this book can stand on its own, but lives in a Gibsonian universe with Flynn, Cayce and others.

Love his books,

Awesome narrator. Story falls far short.

Gibson’s Neuromancer was my favorite sci fiction book when I was a late teen. It was ahead of its time. In my thirties I longed for a movie version that never came. There’s been many similar books and movies since. Total Recall, Ready Player One, etc. too many to count. Those might have been inspired by Neuromancer.
Anyway, I don’t get this book. The diverse future time line and the technology to communicate with human beings 100+ years apart in time... it’s all illogical. was Gibson smoking something when he wrote this book. I will demand a refund...

Only about a 3rd of the way through..

I had to stop and go back and read The Peripheral.

Not sure I'm a fan of Verity. Or maybe it's just because the narrator makes her seem like a dolt. So far the only things she's really said are things like "what's that for how does that work why are we going here what language is that can you do that?" Granted she's in a very mysterious situation. I was just hoping for a demonstration of what exactly makes her "the app whisperer"
: )
More as we go I guess...

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Finished. Not crazy about this one, which surprises me because I love everything he does. The new editor maybe?
Never did warm up to clueless guileless heroine.
I did enjoy everyone in London as usual.
Oh and to watch Connor blow things up is always a treat. : )
The San Francisco action was just a little bit too contrived and confusing. Who is driving who is watching who is monitoring talking. .. Definitely going to read instead of listen and see if I get more out of it.

Will watch for return of UNISS. !!!

Easy to ignore

The author has pride of place in my home. I love most of his writing. I loved the Sukhoi Flankers reference in this story and the greatly sophisticated stub immersion concept (versus its grandparent “cyberspace”).
Gibson doesn’t really bring the heat into the page in this middle arc book. The story hasn’t really progressed beyond the inciting incident except by shuffling the pieces around and doing all the character building for a book yet to be released.
Honestly I wish (former?) Cyberpunk authors would get back to the labor movement and set aside Victorian England entirely. I come for the rebellion not for palace intrigue capped by running away.