William Gibson’s Agency (2020) is the second novel in the Peripheral trilogy. Agency was in manuscript form in 2016; Gibson revised it substantially following the U.S. 2016 election.  Agency shifts perspectives between a post-apocalyptic London in the 22nd century and an alternative version of our own past in San Francisco in 2017. In this world in which Hilary Clinton won the election and Brexit never happened, an “app whisperer,” Verity Jane, is hired to test a sophisticated artificial intelligence named Eunice. In the novel, detectives from the futuristic world reach back through Eunice to help avert nuclear war and the “jackpot” of disasters, including pandemics and mass extinctions, that have traumatized the world they inhabit.

As in Gibson's earlier work that defined cyberpunk, Verity and her largely gig economy allies operate outside of government and powerful corporations. Details about fashion, geography, and surveillance technology all wed with Eunice's witty dialogue and superhuman organizational abilities. The novel balances all-too-familiar threats including climate change and the erosion of democracy with the human goodness at Eunice's origin.  Disaster and despair, the novel promises, are not predetermined truths; human goodness and the agency to change disastrous courses are possible.

Excerpts, Agency

• Artificial Intelligence with Personality--chapters 9-11
• Complexity and Twisting Timelines--chapters 33-37