Instead of a cyberspace I log in and out of decades ago, everything is all at once now. Maybe that's life now, a life already lived knee-deep in a simultaneous online set of realities. People seem to fade in and out of time and space, in various states of presence. Eunice isn't the only half-present entity with impossible powers. identity starts to get muddy and strange. My favorite idea in the whole book, though, is more of a miasma: as characters interact and communicate in all sorts of ways, via wearables, drones, AR/VR, texts, voice. The pieces to a puzzle I couldn't quite comprehend, maybe. But I also started to enjoy an elaborate cat-and-mouse game that spans time and space, involving tasks performed by people who don't know why they're doing them. What I felt, reading Agency, was that the AI presence was impossibly advanced and maybe too all-knowing. There's a mission, and there's a lot of spycraft and strange covert operations in various places at once. Parts from The Peripheral come to play: familiar characters and continued stories. But in addition to the fantasy of exploring another timeline, Agency is really about the impossible mixing of multiple timelines - and multiple states of telepresence. That Stub world still has its own problems. The world-building of The Peripheral and Agency call this sort of alternate timeline a Stub, and it exists alongside our own (if indeed we're living in the 'real' timeline at all). The present-day (or slightly-in-the-past) world of Verity Jane is a world where Hillary Clinton became president instead of Trump. Eunice meets and bonds with a character named Verity Jane, a professional 'app whisperer,' someone with multitudinous strange connections. I'd prefer you let the book take you on this journey. There's a mysterious AI program: an assistant, a person, named Eunice. It involves Bay Area tech startups and AR headsets, spinning a vibe that doesn't feel far off from the life I actually live right now covering emergent tech. The Peripheral felt alien when I first read it Agency feels almost sunny, familiar, chaotic. Read it.Īgency is a more confusing concept.

It was also about the end of the world (the 'jackpot,'), alternate timelines, kleptocracies controlling humanity. The Peripheral was about two futures - a near one and a distant one - that could communicate over a data-based form of time travel, opening up strange possibilities for telepresence via synthetic avatars that act, in a sense, as a time machine. Agency leans heavily on the same characters, dovetailing and reinventing the story. Sometimes he's taken me backward, made me think about the spaces I've already lived.Īgency, the second book in a potential trilogy that started with 2015's The Peripheral, is a little of all of those.įirst of all: Before you go any further, read The Peripheral first. Sometimes his work has blazed ahead of my timeline. But Gibson's work has been a companion since the mid-'90s.

William gibson agency