Agency

William Gibson has been setting his sights on the future for decades, ever since he coined the term cyberspace and popularized it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Now Gibson is back with Agency, a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by current events. San Francisco, 2017. Clinton is in the White House, Brexit never happened—and Verity Jane has a new job. Verity Jane, a talented app whisperer, agrees to work as a beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessible through ordinary-looking glasses. “Eunice,” the human-like AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmented past, and a cunning grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her enigmatic employers don’t yet know just how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity decides it’s best to keep it a secret. Meanwhile, a century later, in London and in a completely different timeline, Wilf Netherton works among plutocrats and looters, survivors of the slow but inexorable apocalypse known as the Jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can observe alternate pasts and influence their final outcomes. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice cannot: his own version of the Jackpot, just around the corner, and the role they both could play in it. In a game of overlapping powers, between kleptocracies, corporate spies, and algorithms with free will, Agency explores the limits of the human, the technological, and the geopolitical with William Gibson's relentless lucidity. More than science fiction: an urgent read about power, history, and the possibility of choice.