The present-day (or slightly-in-the-past) world of Verity Jane is a world where Hillary Clinton became president instead of Trump. Eunice meets and bonds with a character named Verity Jane, a professional "app whisperer," someone with multitudinous strange connections. I'd prefer you let the book take you on this journey. There's a mysterious AI program: an assistant, a person, named Eunice. It involves Bay Area tech startups and AR headsets, spinning a vibe that doesn't feel far off from the life I actually live right now covering emergent tech. The Peripheral felt alien when I first read it Agency feels almost sunny, familiar, chaotic. Read it.Īgency is a more confusing concept. It was also about the end of the world (the "jackpot,"), alternate timelines, kleptocracies controlling humanity. The Peripheral was about two futures - a near one and a distant one - that could communicate over a data-based form of time travel, opening up strange possibilities for telepresence via synthetic avatars that act, in a sense, as a time machine. Agency leans heavily on the same characters, dovetailing and reinventing the story. Sometimes he's taken me backward, made me think about the spaces I've already lived.Īgency, the second book in a potential trilogy that started with 2015's The Peripheral, is a little of all of those.įirst of all: Before you go any further, read The Peripheral first. Sometimes his work has blazed ahead of my timeline. But Gibson's work has been a companion since the mid-'90s.
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