Review of Agency by William Gibson

Damn but William Gibson can write! I realize this might feel like a contradictory pronouncement to the one I made at the start of my review of The Peripheral, but I assure you the statements are compatible. I wasn’t aware of this sequel, Agency, until recently, but it was nice to pluck it from my library’s shelves. While you don’t need to have read the first book—this is a very loose sequel, with overlapping characters but not a direct connection in plot—it would help. Overall, however, I think Agency is the superior of the two novels.

Verity Jane works as an alpha tester for new apps. She agrees to test some AR glasses that include an AI assistant who is more than she (as Eunice identifies) appears to be. This quickly sinks Verity deep into plots to destroy or repossess Eunice and then get Verity out of the picture—and that is when Ainsley Lowbeer, through her intermediary of Wilf Netherton, decides to intervene from the future. Well, from a parallel future. See, Verity and Eunice exist in a “stub” continuum. It’s 2017 there, 2136 back in Wilf’s home timeline. Verity’s time has diverged from his as a result of the initial intervention—by a longtime foe of Wilf and Lowbeer’s—back in 2015. However, Verity’s timeline could still be careening towards destruction, whether it’s the jackpot or just an ol’ fashioned nuclear war. As a result, Wilf does his best to intervene.

As a writer, Gibson is really in the business of creating his own stubs. Worlds where things went a bit different from how they have in ours, where the technology is a bit different. We don’t have the cyberspace cowboys of Neuromancer, but we got the web. We don’t have the virtual reality and nanotechnology from Gibson’s Bridge trilogy, but we have related technologies. With each decade, Gibson takes his same concerns and tweaks them for the technologies of our time. Agency is no exception. Its emphasis on AI, surveillance, and the connectivity of networks—both digital and human—is notable.

I can’t tell if it’s reading The Peripheral nearly exactly a year ago or just that Gibson explains things better here, but I found this book a lot easier to follow. The narrative is also much more straightforward—whereas The Peripheral had a lot of back and forth, people from Flynne’s stub visiting Wilf’s time, etc., for the most part this just has one-way travel. There are fewer side quests, resulting in a more linear plot—not always a good thing, but a good choice here, in my opinion, for the way it allows us to focus on the two timelines and the overall story.

Ironically given its title, the main character, Verity, has very little agency of her own. From almost the moment we meet her, she is being given orders, either by Eunice or one of the members of Eunice’s hastily assembled network of operatives. It’s true that Verity chooses to go along with all of this. She seems to have some semblance of fondness for Eunice despite their short acquaintance. The irony remains, however, and I think this paradox is most easily resolved if we realize Verity is not the main character. Eunice is. Eunice is the protagonist, even if there are large swathes of the book where she isn’t around—Gibson tells us, pretty explicitly, that her branch plants are working on a lot of things in the background throughout the story. Verity is much closer to being a stock character, like Joe-Eddy or Virgil. It’s a bit of a weird narrative choice, but I guess it kind of works.

Really, though, that’s what Agency is all about. Writing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, Gibson nevertheless presages some of this event’s effects on the world. Similarly, he anticipates the bubble of generative AI and the attendant problems this could cause—though Eunice is far more AGI than anything we could create at the moment.

Though this book is replete with the spectre of the jackpot—a Gibsonian view of the apocalypse if ever there was one, albeit also eerily probable—and all of its negative consequences, Agency, like The Peripheral, is actually really optimistic. It’s a story about people who are enthusiastic for the future—or a future. Lowbeer, Wilf, and Rainey’s palpable concern for the inhabitants of Verity’s stub, despite that past timeline in no way affecting theirs, is really touching. The same goes for the moments we get between Wilf and Rainey and with their son, Thomas, and how Wilf dotes on him as a proud dad. It’s cutesy—but it is also meant to remind us that even after an apocalypse, life goes on. We keep going. We rebuild. And, given the chance to avert that apocalypse or the equivalent thereof, some people would like to do that.

I stand by what I said last year: I think Gibson’s legacy as a writer will almost certainly be the influence he has had on science fiction as a genre more so than his novels themselves. When I express awe at Gibson’s writing ability, it’s less so for his storytelling prowess—Agency is a serviceable thriller but nothing to write home about—and more so for his ability to take our contemporary concerns and mould them into something just ever-so-slightly Other, just enough to get us to take them more seriously (I hope). Gibson is not prescient by any means; however, he does possess that excellent quality, for a science-fiction author, of being clairvoyant. He can see our present, zoom out and see the big picture for humanity, and then choose which “what if” paths to go down. Agency is one such path. If you like intrigue, action, chase sequences, and sentient AI, it’s a path you ought to read.