I read half of Agency before realising I barely had a clue of what was happening. Something about a software tester going off with a rogue AI and lots of important-sounding people standing in probably expensive buildings saying lofty things – I think the software tester and the rogue AI were being chased by some nebulous enemy? This is my first and last William Gibson – I feel that his reputation is overstated given that Agency is bad scifi combined with even worse writing and storytelling.

Agency has a really fun premise. From a future London dedicated agents are able to affect and improve versions of the past called 'stubs.' They do this to try and prevent or mitigate something awfully bad called the Jackpot, that has transformed the future version of Earth. William Gibson is telling us the readers that if we don't correct course the Jackpot is coming for us I think.
The main character is called Verity, and it is not long before she is forced to be on the run from the forces of darkness. She is aided by a friendly AI called Eunice, and agents from both the future andother stubs. It is all jolly good fun, and Gibson brings it bang up to date by reversing the Brexit referendum and making Hillary Clinton win instead of Trump. Where the book falls down is that there is no real sense of personal jeooardy for Verity. Sure, she is living in a world where bad stuff is happening, but it doesn't feel as if she is in any real danger.

Agency is the second book in William Gibson's Peripheral series. The first, Peripheral, was published in October 2014, so we've waited a long time for the sequel. Full disclosure, I haven't actually read Peripheral. Not for any particular reason, it's just a ton of books get published each year and I can't always keep up. However, I thought the premise of Agency looked great, and so I decided to just dive in. Yes, I am an absolute monster who enjoys reads series books in the wrong order, sometimes accidentally, and sometimes on purpose.

My rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐4 stars (out of 5)

* Spoiler Warning*

The book throws you immediately into the action, which is good. Yet, because I hadn't read the first book I felt like I was trying to absorb lots of different information at once: multiple POVs, futuristic tech and multiple locations and timelines. The book centres on Verity Jane, a so-called app whisperer (no, I don't know what that means either) who is hired to evaluate some new tech. The new tech is Eunice, and she has her own ideas about what she wants to do with her life.

I really liked Eunice, and her and Verity had a good rapport, and I liked how Verity was drawn deeper and deeper into trouble by the fact that she simply knew about Eunice, it was a good conundrum. I also enjoyed how tech was used in innovative ways to further the story and solve the characters problems. However, I really felt like Verity was missing a personality. I couldn't relate to her, and moreover, I felt like we almost never got any emotionality from her character. She never seemed scared, or angry, no matter how many crazy things were happening, and that felt a bit odd. I also wanted to get more of a sense of who Verity was as a person, and what her life was like before Eunice. Her past is almost solely defined by her previous relationship with a tech billionaire, which seemed like a missed opportunity.

I did really enjoy the book and raced through it, keen to find out how it all fit together. While the story didn't feel quite as cutting edge as I was expecting, I was still really impressed by the detail of this futuristic world. I've read a few books over the last couple of years that cover very similar themes so the story didn't feel as new as I'd hoped. However, if you enjoyed Walkaway by Cory Doctorow, Atlas Alone by Emma Newman, Emily Eternal by M.G. Wheaton or Across The Void by S.K. Vaughn, then you'll probably enjoy this too.

Long time Gibson fan here, however I felt like a fish out of water reading "Agency"; not only is the beginning incredibly confusing - I guess reading "The Peripheral" first would have cleared things up - but the ending chapters do little to tie up loose ends as well.

I've read Neuromancer, and felt that I should really try and expand my genre reading, so I thought I'd give this a go. Not having read The Peripheral, I'm not sure how much I missed if this is a sequel, but I just couldn't connect with this at all. For fans of Gibson and the sci-fi/alternate-future genre, I'm sure this will be welcome. Not my thing, though, and I admit to find myself skipping pages just to complete it. The writing quality, as you would expect from Gibson, merits it 3 stars. Content-wise, I'm not able to comment.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

DNF at 21%

This was my first (and most likely last) novel by William Gibson. Which is a big disappointment, as I was very much looking forward to this Sci-Fi story, adding it to my “most anticipated of 2020” immediately after I heard it was coming out this January.

After attempting it twice and reading as far as 21% of the book, I had to put it down because I suddenly lost the ability to understand words. William Gibson’s writing felt confusing and incoherent, like a collection of random words.

Maybe the story itself is actually good (I wouldn’t know as I didn’t understand any of it), but the writing style was a huge miss for me.

I’m a long-time fan of William Gibson and couldn’t wait to get my hands on a copy of this. It’s not a pre-requisite, but I think you get the best out of Agency if you’ve read The Peripheral first.
A great mixture of cutting-edge current and future tech as well as being an astute and acerbic commentary on the US and UK’s political climates. Unfortunately, it really does feel like we’re entering our own Jackpot - I just hope we have a version of Lowbeer watching from the wings to pick up the pieces.
A very enjoyable novel that leaves an opening for future follow-ons with nothing too challenging and far more accessible intellectually than some of Stephenson’s for example.
Great stuff.

I read this one before The Peripheral, my bad, but I read that one also, another mistake. Agency is not half as good as The peripheral, but it helped me to comprehend the first installment in this series. Anyway it was not a good book in my opinion, if I didn't have to review it for Netgalley I would have probably quit around page 150, which is also a pity because we are talking about Gibson here, William Gibson......

Ho letto questo secondo volume della serie e solo dopo ho letto il primo: The Peripheral. Il che ha portato immediatamente il numero dei miei errori a 2, prima di tutto perché non li ho letti in ordine (anche se Agency mi ha fatto capire molto meglio The Peripheral) e secondo perché The Peripheral é decisamente il migliore tra i due libri, e The Agency poteva tranquillamente essere almeno un centinaio di pagine piú breve ; inoltre se non avessi dovuto recensirlo per Netgalley avrei anche smesso di leggerlo intorno a pagina 15o, il che fa pensare, anche perché stiamo parlando di William Gibson qui, mica del primo che passa....

THANKS NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!

I have read most of William Gibson's books since “Neuromancer”, and was looking forward to this one. I liked some of the concepts in there but finished with a mixture of feelings - confusion and emotional distance from the characters. I felt as if I’d read a draft that needed reworking, and kept on trying to envisage the plot diagram that I imagined lay behind this - a glossary of characters and their relationships to each other would have helped, although I understood the sense of confusion for Verity being made apparent to the reader. Confusing one's readers is not necessarily a fruitful way to keep them engaged! The shift in perspectives from stub to stub was hard to keep up with, and characters being in drones or embodied was also confusing. Some interesting ideas but overall the book disappointingly didn't grab me like his others, sad and sorry to say.

This is a follow up to The Peripheral, which is up there as one of Gibson’s best books for me. I’m assuming he is working on his usual template of loosely connected trilogies and that there will be another to come in this world. Being a return visit, this doesn’t have the same kind of impact or originality as The Peripheral did, but there is plenty here that fans will appreciate; his traditional sparse prose, meticulous examination of detail in fashion and tech, and big, big, ideas. The usual labyrinthine, noirish plot is present and correct as well - it took me until half way through the book before I felt I had a handle on what was going on. It feels like a much more optimistic book than its predecessor (as long as you don’t look at some of the details too closely), and I am left looking forward to a putative third volume. Basically, Gibson is one of our finest writers, and any new book should be celebrated.

Great, hard work but great. I am a fan of William Gibson and this stood up with the best. However I did find it overly complicated and I had to concentrate fully on it. Having said that I did enjoy it.

This is my first book by the writer, and I really enjoyed it. It's a tech thriller, which is full of action and a strong plot. There are two universes in different time zones. One future and one present.
It's more plot driven with a lot of speed and adventure rather than character driven. So, it's a fun and quick read.

Thanks a lot NetGalley and the publishers for this copy in exchange for an honest review.

This is the first William Gibson novel I've ever read, but I enjoyed it. It can be read with no knowledge of his other novels. Verity is living in an alternate 2017, where Hillary Clinton won the election, but she becomes entangled with events a hundred years later through an AI called Eunice. There were some great descriptions of future technology and some thrilling action. The future is believable, with some sort of climate/financial crisis having caused the trust of a corrupt, mafia you're society. Well written, like a less technical Neal Stephenson novel, but the characters were not particularly fleshed out. The technology was used as a bit of a Deus ex machina in places, and there were a few parts that dragged, where we are told lots of extraneous detail (I feel like the drone's charger and her Muji bag were mentioned a dozen times!) but the story zipped along.

Agency is 'minor' Gibson, insofar as its themes and plot generally stay within the space carved out so well by The Peripheral, but it's changed up enough to make for a worthwhile and often compelling middle chapter in this trilogy. (Note, there be spoilers beyond this point).

Much, of course, is exactly what one expects from any mid-to-late Gibson novel: the sleek poly-hyphenated prose; fragments of the future hiding in plain sight; larval AIs; intelligence contractors of dubious morals; otaku jeans. And by setting Agency both so close to the present day (as in Pattern Recognition) and amidst tech-creatives in the Bay Area (cf. All Tomorrow's Parties), it has an almost valedictory feel. You can't help imagining Milgrim is about to walk out of Golden Gate Park at any moment, or that we could suddenly cut away to Chevette's own stub. Unfortunately, there are also some familiar story elements that feel trotted out from The Peripheral in a fairly pro forma way - gotta check in with Madison and other minor characters! Are the klept still plotting ineffectually? Even in the book's new timeline, the central section falls prey to a slightly laboured race from point A to B to C to D to B that really limits the *ahem* agency of the characters and whose fast cuts would play better on-screen than on the page. It's not actually the launch of a William Gibson Literary Universe, but it really could be with a few small edits.

Still, amidst all this deja and presque vu there is some.philosophical novelty. Is trying to help someone holding less knowledge helicopter parenting, imperialism, or just common decency? Is there such a thing as having too much control, no.matter how benevolent? Who gets to say what history is real, especially if the past is genuinely mutable? And would reversing some of our most recent political messes actually change anything, or are we already so doomed we need a very literal deus ex machina to save us?

Any answers Gibson offers are oblique and partial, but between those heady questions, a propulsive final act, and the pleasures of his prose and sceptical eye, it's still a good use of time before the jackpot hits.

I never thought I would use the phrase "tedious William Gibson novel," but apparently this is the version of the world we now live in.

This tedious William Gibson novel is clearly a William Gibson novel: it has the effortless prose, the vivid (if occasionally inaccurate) imagery, the geek-culture namedrops, the characters who are outsiders to power and the mainstream. What it doesn't have much of is a plot, and what the characters don't have much of, by irony that may or may not be unconscious, is agency. They do almost nothing that has any impact on anything. In fact, they do almost nothing, and it's narrated at great length.

The author establishes a strict alternation between two viewpoint characters: Verity, in a version of 2017 California where the US election of 2016 and the Brexit vote went the other way, and Netherton, in a post-apocalyptic future descended, quite possibly, from our version of the timeline. This strict alternation regardless of what's going on and who has the most at stake at the time, and this choice of viewpoint characters, soon begin to work against the success of the book.

Both viewpoint characters are essentially passive. Verity spends most of the book as a passenger, being moved around to escape from a corrupt corporation who hired her at the start of the novel. It's never really clear to me why anyone involves Netherton in events, rather than just going direct; he's a go-between and a middleman and an observer, and the one effective thing he does (fighting off a random encounter that has no lead-up and no follow-through) is entirely by accident. Many of the chapters, particularly the Netherton ones, consist of someone, usually Netherton, repeating something we have just been shown in the previous chapter to someone else who wasn't observing at the time. (Not very far into the book, the two viewpoints connect, by a technological means of communication that's never explained in any depth, but looks to the users like VR.)

The beginning is promising. Verity is hired by that dodgy corporation because of her reputation as an "app whisperer" to do vague things with a new alpha build, an advanced AI called Eunice. Eunice is templated on a feisty, fiercely intelligent and capable African-American woman, and is by far the most interesting character in the book; after <spoiler>she disappears</spoiler> (relatively early on), the novel immediately bogs down in exposition, pipe-laying, long descriptions of logistics (she sat here, she put her bag there, she looked at this), and people explaining things to other people that we've just been shown in the previous chapter. Once <spoiler>Eunice unexpectedly returns through no action of the other characters</spoiler>, the book wraps up rapidly, but without much involvement of the carefully-gathered group of people who are supposedly the protagonists; they have spend all their time while the world was threatened with nuclear disaster doing mostly mundane or evil-corporation-avoidance-related things, rather than working on anything to do with the threat, and <spoiler>the unnamed president, clearly Hillary Clinton, sorts it all out anyway with hardly any help even from Eunice - revealing that the normally pessimistic Gibson has a more optimistic view than I do about at least one thing: HRC's potential to be a great and wonderful president, rather than simply a much more competent and all-around less bad one than Trump</spoiler>.

I got the feeling partway through that the excessive number of secondary characters with backstories that didn't seem relevant to the current story were left over from a previous novel, and indeed it seems this is a sequel to <i>The Peripheral</i>. I was surprised to discover, looking at the front of the book where they are listed, that I'd missed three novels by Gibson since the last one I read, so I don't know if the mediocre dullness of this one is a new development or part of a trend. Since I got a pre-release version from Netgalley, I also don't know if the couple of glitches (such as placing jungle-dwelling orangutans on the savanna) will be fixed before publication; they may be. What I don't think can be fixed is the overnarration of mundane logistics that stands where a plot would normally go, or the limp and ineffectual puppets that are the viewpoint characters.

Accordingly, I'm awarding this my non-prize for Most Disappointing Novel Read in 2019.

Agency, William Gibson’s latest book inhabits the same universe as [book:The Peripheral|24611819], his last novel which came out in 2014. It’s a long time between drinks, but you don’t have to have read that book to make sense of this one (I had indeed pretty much forgotten everything - a talent of mine that enables me to re-read books often with no spoilers).

The first half of Agency introduces a number of characters across a world set in the present time (albeit an alternate history) and a future world (which may or may not be based on our timeline). Initially it's somewhat tricky keeping track of them all, but by the time the second half comes around, it's rolling along in a very enjoyable William Gibson style.

The present world storyline centers around Verity, an "App Whisperer”, Eunice an Artificial Intelligence entity (which will bring back memories of WinterMute), and Stets, some sort of generic Silicon Valley Billionaire only not a jerk. There’s a whole back story about Verity and Stets that isn’t expanded on which had me frantically googling to find out what previous Gibson book they had appeared in (none as far as I can tell - but see also the paragraph above where I describe my special superpower).

The other world is set in a very interesting and believable future London, with Russian mobsters, secret service operatives and nanobots making things furiously. Before I deleted Twitter off my phone I was following the author and it was great fun to see him asking his English fans questions about language usage and parts of London. I’ll have to re-read and do some more googling to see what made it into the book.

While this isn't Gibson's best book, it's still an enjoyable read and I’m hoping for a third in this series.

I received an advance copy for review from NetGalley.

An action based tech thriller by William Gibson. Two universes- one in the future, one close to our present. The future universe, post a "jackpot" apocalyptic event, attempts to change the course of history, but motives and outcomes are uncertain. The action never stops and the tech described is mainly that of surveillance and remote presence - drones, cameras, smart glasses and (in the future) flesh avatars. A feeling of uncanniness and unease runs through the future universe, but Gibson carefully leaves it to the readers imagination to wonder what horrors are being glossed over.
With characters that catch the reader's interest but are never fully fleshed, this was a quick and interesting read. I wondered if the characters and universe are crossovers from other Gibson books...

I have always been a huge fan of William Gibson, ever since studying NEUROMANCER (1984) at university. His writing has always been fascinating in its prescience - and where once his stories were clearly set in the future, now they sit in an alternative present that is no less inventive.

Beyond saying that AGENCY is set in an alternative reality where Hilary Clinton won the 2016 US election, and that it is a follow up to THE PERIPHERAL (2014) - or a prequel and sequel rolled into one - it is hard to say much more without littering a review with spoilers.

This was a great read, and I would highly recommend it - although, as with much of Gibson’s work, it is possibly better to have read any preceding novels in the same series before diving in.

Long time fan of William Gibson, I’d been eagerly anticipating publication of Agency in January and was thrilled to receive an advance copy of it. Thank you Netgalley, Penguin Books and Viking.

Agency starts in typical Gibson way, fast pace, lots happening, new concepts that will have you scratching your head for an explanation, multiple points of view. This is one of the reasons I love Gibson books, they are challenging, prophetic, speculative and highly enjoyable (even when you’re scratching your head). It’s been around five years since The Peripheral, his last novel and so it took me a little while to remember and place the characters who return in Agency, Lowbeer, Netherton and Ash among others. The story in Agency follows on from The Peripheral, with characters from a future remotely interacting with a past to influence people and events. It could be read as a standalone though.

I thought The Peripheral, which introduced the concept of accessing and interacting with different timelines in the past (stubs) without it affecting your own timeline, was great. I didn’t think Agency as good. The overall story could have been stronger, there is a lot going on but it felt like a smaller episode in Lowbeer’s timeline, a novella rather than a full entry in the series. I felt that Verity, one of the main new characters, didn’t really do very much other than being taken from one place to another. I thought Gibson could have at least had a bit of fun with her profession – ‘app whisperer’ in his inimitable style. I also wasn’t fully sold on the 2017 setting. Apart from a major plot point, there are a couple of tantalising asides about a female US president and the Brexit referendum having gone the other way. There is a sort of secondary plotline which could have made the 2017 setting relevant but it gets lost in the somewhat rushed ending.

Gibson is at his best writing about future and near future in particular. In Agency, this is Lowbeer and Netherton’s present: the klept, the various tech like assemblers, London a hundred and a bit years from now, similar (loved the reference to blue neon lights of Rio Cinema) but also unrecognisable in many ways. I’m hoping the third book will focus on Lowbeer and various associates and the klept - so much potential.

I have never read any of William Gibson’s books before and I was very impressed by this book so I will be rectifying that soonest, this is thought provoking science fiction with good drama and story telling with characters you invest in and care about