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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/22/agency-william-gibson-review This dazzling vision of politics and power across alternate timelines is both observation and warningWilliam Gibson has never believed that science fiction predicts the future: it only ever talks about the present. His most recent novel, 2014’s The Peripheral, introduced us to an ecopolitical disaster called “the jackpot” and a world subsequently run by the loose, shadowy group known as “the klept”. Thanks to the development of massive quantum computing, these oligarchs, the history of whose money is deeply implicated with the history of gangster capital, amuse themselves in 2136 by discovering – or perhaps it might be better described as creating – their own precursors, the broken remains of alternate timelines. These abandoned pasts, stubs of futures that might have been, are recognisable as versions of the world we live in now. They’re not exactly colonies – no money is made, no extractive capitalism takes place. Instead, members of the klept run them like computer games, or meddle like the old gods on Olympus, manipulating culture and geopolitics at will. They are a leisure space for multi-trillionaires: the reference to the political meddling of our own billionaires is clear and self-explanatory. Agency, the second novel of the series, begins with the classic Gibsonian unboxing scene. Verity Jane, “app whisperer” by trade, and new recruit to a startup called Tulpagenics, takes home some of the company’s product, comprising a pair of mysterious glasses, a headset and a phone; and, trying it out, is instantly placed in communication with a sophisticated artificial intelligence called Eunice or UNISS. “Is it real?” she asks her new boss, surprised. That, he tells her, is exactly what she has been employed to determine. Instead, Eunice bustles into Verity’s life, fixing it and messing it up at the same time, employing everyone Verity knows, from ex-lovers to ex-employers, for what seems at first to be a project of self-understanding. The AI wants to know how she knows things, why she does things, why she’s been switched on. But nuclear war is looming in Verity’s stub, which in 2016 began to diverge in two important ways from our own, and we realise that there’s a lot more to Eunice than meets the eye (even her own). Soon she has vanished, leaving Verity caught up in a carefully assembled tangle of secret operators – including “trust networks” (those ramified interpersonal connections that in Gibson’s work often maintain and extend digital cottage industries and the communities based around them), tech barons, masters of the gig economy and algorithmic sub-Eunices – in service of a plan to which none of them is privy. Continue reading...
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