Gibson up to his old new tricks
Agency William Gibson Berkley
When I reviewed William Gibson’s groundbreaking novel The Peripheral nearly six years ago, I dared to hope for a sequel. And now we have it in Agency, a book as engaging, thought-provoking and delightful as its predecessor.
While the novelty of Gibson’s core conceit — virtual time travel across parallel universes, not in the flesh but by high-bandwidth communication — is no longer as startling, he still squeezes fresh juice from the novum. Strong co-starring characters unique to this tale interact with old favourites. A wistful continuum premières — in which Hillary Clinton won the U.S. presidency in 2016 — offering opportunity for cultural commentary.
And the intricate noir-thriller plotting affords constant entertainment and suspense.
Our heroine is Verity Jane, a woman living in contemporary San Francisco, whose profession is “app whisperer.” Basically, she tests unreleased software products to reveal hidden flaws and make them secure and reliable.
Her newest gig is with a firm named Tulpagenics, which presents her with a pair of augmented-reality eyeglasses, a special cellphone and a headset, and has her exploring without explicit instructions. Booting up the rig, she is confronted by the avatar of a woman who calls herself Eunice. Eunice proves to be the world’s first fully sentient artificial intelligence, smarter than any human, but still somewhat inexperienced and naive.
This is interleaved with another narrative. In the year 2136, humanity exists in an uneasy truce with larger intelligences. It’s a post-scarcity, near-singularity situation, although there’s a privileged caste dubbed the “klepts.” Our focus here is Wilf Netherton, a half-willing agent for the scary Det. Insp. Ainsley Lowbeer. Lowbeer has an overriding mission: “She’s altering stubs to produce worlds in which the klept enjoy less power.”
A stub is a counterfactual continuum, existing alongside the dominant 2136 world, produced by intervention in the shared past. Not physical intervention from literal time-travellers, but by two-way communications. However, since remote telepresence is a form of communication, folks from 2136 can operate avatars — peripherals — in the stubs.
Thus, Verity finds that one of her outlaw companions is a robot affording Netherton an active presence in the year 2017.
Netherton wants Eunice restored as much as Verity does.
He also wants to help Clinton avoid a nuclear Armageddon originating with a terrorist group in the Middle East.
Does all this sound confusing? Rest assured that Gibson lays everything out with clarity. Gibson has been dealing with the matter of artificial intelligence ever since his earliest trilogy that began with 1984’s Neuromancer.
But what is different about this book is a kind of elder statesman wisdom and optimism. Ironically, the 1980s — retrospectively a less fraught era — generated Gibson’s bleakest scenarios, while the arguably more dire present has seen him moving toward an more mordant lightheartedness.