Playthings of the powerful
A present hacked by malevolent forces from the future is threatened with nuclear war.
Having established a narrative device allowing a future society to tamper with events in previous eras in 2014’s The Peripheral, science-fiction icon William Gibson seemingly couldn’t resist the temptation to do the same himself with its sequel, Agency.
He spent a year rethinking the book in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, then decided to set his novel in the future as well as our very recent past – or, at least, a version of it.
In the earlier of Agency’s intertwined chronologies, Hillary Clinton is president and the UK didn’t vote for Brexit. But it’s hardly a utopia and the world is on the brink of nuclear war.
The President exists mostly in the background, her blessedly defeated opponent seldom mentioned by name, if occasionally in familiar gross detail: “She was looking at how the artist had rendered his hands. Grabby.”
Instead, at the forefront of the novel is Verity, a tech-head “app whisperer” who takes on a job to test a new digital assistant, a setup that evokes Gibson’s work in the early 2000s when his fascinating futurism was overtaken by contemporary culture. “The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed,” he said in 2003 at the time of Pattern Recognition, his first novel with a contemporary setting.
Echoing this sentiment, Verity’s assistant uses cutting-edge artificial intelligence and introduces itself as “Eunice”. Barely hours into sentience, it is globally connected and learning at a phenomenal pace. Eunice’s capabilities – her agency – are what optimists of the future need to avoid World War III, and they need Verity’s help.
If that’s not enough of a ticking clock, the people who made Eunice want to put her back in her box right away.
As ever, the author demonstrates his trademark adeptness in conveying complex ideas in detail-rich yet economical fashion, even if Agency might not deliver quite the thrill of discovery as its predecessor did.
As with The Peripheral, those intervening in this era are 22nd-century survivors of “the jackpot”, a nearapocalypse survived by a fifth of the world’s population, now rich in both resources and technology. Uber-rich future humans have developed the ability to manipulate “stubs”, alternate universes accessed through powerful quantum computing of mysterious origins. Stubs can be privately owned and collected as playthings. Gibson exploits this storytelling potential with glee; it provides him with the means to tell interlinking stories set in two time periods, free from time-travel paradoxes.
The gang that got together in The Peripheral focuses here on the new Trumpfree stub and its looming crisis in which the duo of Verity and Eunice might be the only hope.
Eunice’s near-omnipotence is great for Verity to have on her side in what becomes something of a hectic odd-couple race to the finish, even if this forces Verity – as with other characters in the book in their own ways – to place her trust in unseen actors with opaque motivations, casting the title in a new light.
Agency will please Gibson fans – it functions more than effectively as both a sci-fi thriller and a warning that there may be more to worry about than the latest political developments – but it doesn’t prove quite as head-scratchingly satisfying as
The Peripheral. Perhaps that’s because you can’t experience the thrill of jumping into this bold sci-fi universe twice. That shouldn’t dent enthusiasm for a final instalment in this trilogy, and with any luck it won’t take another Trump to make it happen.
Hillary Clinton is president and the UK didn’t vote for Brexit. But it’s hardly a utopia.