Agency

November 4, 2019
Cyberpunk pioneer Gibson disappoints with this inventive but jumbled prequel to The Periphery. In 2017, gifted “app whisperer” Verity Jane is hired to beta test a pair of eye-glasses that double as an artificial intelligence assistant named Eunice. As Eunice’s personality and capabilities grow, Verity decides to hide the AI’s rapid development from her mysterious new employers. She can’t keep the secret for long, however, as agents from a century into the future descend to make sure that Eunice­—a misplaced technology from their time—doesn’t start a nuclear war. Though the writing is packed with intriguing concepts and characters, the scrambled timelines and shifting narrative perspective make an already complicated plot even harder to follow. The characters from the future fall flat, especially in comparison to the dynamic, fully-realized personalities of Verity and Eunice. Cyberpunk fans looking to dive into the “what-if’s” of an alternate timeline will be as enraptured as ever by Gibson’s imagination, but they’ll be left with more questions than answers.

December 1, 2019
A sequel to The Peripheral (2014), in which bored dilettantes from the future meddle virtually with potential pasts while more responsible people try to ameliorate the damage. The novel opens, as so many Gibson novels do, with an intelligent, creative young woman accepting a not terribly well-defined job from an enigmatic (possibly sinister) executive involving a piece of cutting-edge technology. In this case, that technology is an emerging AI with origins in top-secret military research who calls herself Eunice. The young woman, Verity Jane, spends only a couple of days with Eunice (via company-issued glasses, phone, and headset) before her new boss, Gavin, gets nervous about Eunice's potential and starts attempting to monitor every move of the human-AI pair. What Verity does not know is that her present day of 2017, in which a decreased Russian influence on social media led to an unnamed woman who is clearly Hillary Clinton winning the presidency, the U.K. voting to remain in the E.U., and a volatile situation in Turkey threatening to turn nuclear, was deliberately manipulated by someone in 2136 who enjoys creating doomsday scenarios among possible past timelines. It's up to future law enforcement (who can only contact the timeline via digital communication or virtually controlled mechanical peripherals) to get in touch with Verity and Eunice and recruit them to prevent looming global catastrophe. Given Gibson's Twitter-stated unhappiness with the timeline in which he currently finds himself, it's hard to know what he's implying here: That outside intervention would have been required to achieve a Hillary Clinton presidency and defeat Brexit? Or that our own vigilance on social media could/should have brought those outcomes about? And why would these two potentially positive occurrences in that timeline instigate an even darker scenario than the one readers are currently experiencing--and also require that intervention to fix it? Have we reached the point of no return in all potential 21st-century timelines, doomed, at least in part, regardless of what political and social choices we make now? (Nor is it ever really explained why Gavin turns so quickly on Verity and Eunice, unless it's simply to inject the story with urgency and transform it into the author's favorite plot device, the chase.) This is vintage, or possibly tired, Gibson, filling his usual quest-driven template with updated contemporary or just-past-contemporary politics, technology, and culture. Someone else might've made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it's an often dull and pointless-seeming retread.

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November 15, 2019
Hired to beta test a new AI called Eunice (think a cross between Alexa and Google Glass on steroids), app whisperer Verity realizes that she is working with some bleeding-edge tech. Eunice, instantly capable of face recognition, orders coffee at the local cafe and pays for it from Verity's PayPal account. But that is just the beginning of what she is capable of. Eunice is an autonomous, self-learning agent, a cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar . . . digital mini-self. She is sentient, self-aware, and from the future. Eunice has different plans for Verity, and the two go off the grid where they eventually are contacted by Wilf Netherton (last seen in The Peripheral, 2014) from an alternate-future London. Gibson delayed Agency's publication following the results of the U.S. presidential election, envisioning a recent past where, owing to meddlers from the future, the president is a woman, and the Brexit vote failed, but nuclear war is probable. Netherton, now sober and happily married, is hired to assist Verity to avert disaster. Gibson blurs the line between real and speculative technology in a fast-paced thriller that will affirm to readers that it was well worth the wait. [HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Gibson wrote about the internet before there was an internet; plenty of readers will be anxious for his take on AI.](Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2019

In the present, talented techie Verity Jane joins a shadowy San Francisco startup to beta-test a digital assistant named Eunice and soon senses that Eunice has a face, a backstory, and keen combat skills. Meanwhile, a century hence in London, Wilf Netherton is just trying to survive the slow-moving apocalypse called the jackpot even as his boss investigates alternate pasts. And that's where Verity and Eunice come in. A sequel to the New York Times best-selling novel The Peripheral.

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