Agency

Agency by William Gibson (2020 Penguin-Viking softcover 403pp)

I’ve been a fan of Gibson’s writing since he helped define the Cyberpunk genre back in the late 1980s. In 2014, after a stint writing near-contemporary thrillers, he returned to science fiction with “The Peripheral”. His latest book “Agency” shares many of the same concepts, settings and characters with that volume.

We alternate between 22^nd century London where the ‘Klepts’ (i.e. the rich) have ascended to power following a series of natural and man-made disasters known collectively as “the Jackpot” and an alternate 2017 in a ‘stub’ universe where Hillary Clinton became US President in 2016 and international tensions may soon lead to nuclear War. Characters from the former can communicate digitally with the latter and that’s where most of the drama lies.

Our heroes are Verity Jane in 2017 and Wilf Netherton in the future London. Verity is hired to test what seems to be a new wearable electronic gadget. In short order the device turns out to have a mind of its own and starts re-arranging Verity’s life and world. Wilf, meanwhile, finds himself doing the bidding of the shadowy cop/secret agent Lowbeer as they attempt to remotely change the history of Verity’s era.

I wish there was more to it than that but that’s pretty much all of it in a nutshell. There are moments where Gibson’s angular descriptive prose still shines and many of his ideas remain sharp. However, I felt underwhelmed by the book as a whole. Much of the plot is transactional – she goes there, does task A then goes here and meets person B and so on. It feels flat and the stakes don’t feel high. The opposing threats remain mainly off-screen and vague. Gibson remains too obsessed with drones; he’s used them repeatedly in his books and what once seemed novel technology now bores me silly.

This book is 400 pages long but feels more like a 200-page novel, the chapters are short often no more than 2 or 3 pages in length. I wish I felt more positive about Agency and hope if Gibson writes a third book in this series that he pulls something amazing out of the bag.