[Review] Agency, by William Gibson. And why his earlier books work, but Agency doesn’t.

Recently finished (basically) all of William Gibson's novels in audiobook, having most of them in paperback as a kid. I wanted to review the latest book, which I found the least enjoyable. But to talk about where he went wrong, I figure it makes sense to first talk about what he does right.

He's known as the guy who invented cyberspace, the matrix, etc… the one who writes about tech that is always 15-20 years away. But I never really cared about any of that, I just dig his writing. His stories float somewhere between hard and soft sci-fi, depending on when you catch him in his career… his earliest books feature sentient machines, convincing holograms, exotic bio-implants. The latest have a sort of time-travel and nanotech. In between, we have nothing more magical than VR heatsets and drones.

He'll casually mention things, in a seemingly throwaway sentence, that makes you imagine whole alternate realities, structures that form a future that's weird, but plausible. For example, in the bridge trilogy, the eponymous bridge is the golden gate bridge, and we learn that northern california and southern california have split into separate states. But he never goes into why. It's not relevant. The "why" could easily form its own trilogy, but we just hear about it in passing. Same with stuff like, I dunno, orbital banks. Why are they orbital? Doesn't matter, it's an exercise left to the reader. It's just a cool detail.

He has a poetic streak that flares up suddenly, in otherwise non-flowery writing. On the subject of jetlag: "She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage."

The names are musical and occasionally absurd. We have "Lucius Warbaby", or "Hubertus Bigend", and even "Chia Pet Mackenzie"… and somehow they just work. The bad guys are fleshed out just enough, but the protagonists feel quite real. Some are regular joes, like a bicycle courier or a rent-a-cop. A few are a little more exotic, like a former rock star. But they all feel familiar, relatable. Not like, I dunno, a starfleet captain or robocop or something.

My favorites are Virtual Light, and Pattern Recognition.

In Virtual Light, a young bike messenger gets curious and crashes an upscale party, where she runs into a handsy asshole with some funky glasses. She steals them, on a whim, and realizes some pretty dangerous people want them back. They're powerful VR that taps straight into your optic nerves (essentially Meta glasses, but a little better, and 30 years ahead of the real deal). This particular pair of glasses holds plans for a redevelopment scheme for San Francisco that some powerful people do not want leaked. So they pay whoever they need to, to get them back and keep the leak contained.

Chevette lives on the eponymous Bridge (in the bridge trilogy). In Gibson's future, which is not totally dystopian but is definitely a bit fucked… big chunks of society and the government have broken down, and we find out that the Golden Gate bridge has become a sort of huge homeless encampment. One that's in continuous development, becoming a real place with its own identity… from tents to a shantytown, to a tourist attraction.

Rydell, a former cop, is enlisted to help find Chevette and recover the glasses. He's partnered with some amoral psychopaths, including 2 corrupt cops and a hitman… but they didn't realize he has a conscience. Rydell decides to help her.

I love the bridge trilogy… the setting is unique, there's a bit of cyberpunk flavor and a bit of san francisco. I really like the vibe.

Pattern Recognition follows Cayce Pollard, a consultant who has found a way to monetize her weird sensitivity – more like an allergy – to branding. She gets paid well to essentially give a thumbs up or down on potential rebrands and logo designs. And during a trip to London (the 'mirror world') we learn a bit more about her… a father who disappeared during 9/11, and a mother who's become enmeshed in the world of "EVP"… essentially, enthusiasts who believe you can capture messages from spirits through audio recordings.

Cayce's distance from home, her panic attacks from her unusual marketing phobias, her strained relationship from mom and the mystery of dad's disappearance… it combines to create a very real vibe of someone who is lonely and struggling, but pushing forward. She's found friendshop online, in a forum dedicated to discussion of The Footage… haunting, provocative scenes that get released online periodically, whose original source are a total mystery. Not viral marketing, but pure creative expression.

She is contracted by a rich, polite, occasionally charming Belgian marketing magnate, to find the source of this footage. He is written as looking like a chubby Tom Cruise, somehow harmless and predatory. Finding the maker(s), is something every footage-head dreams of doing anyway, but now she suddenly has the means to pull it off, and she's torn between her curiousity, and her knowledge that it can't end well, when money meets art. In her quest, she's inexplicably harrassed by one of the employees at the company that most recently contracted her services, exploiting phobias they shouldn't know about.

I enjoy this mostly for the characters. Cayce and Bigend are interesting, and the mystery of the footage (and her dad) keeps you engaged without the need for complex worldbuilding. It could take place in 2025.

So that's what works, in a Gibson book, for me. Why doesn't Agency (2020) work?

Gibson writes in trilogies, and across all of these we get a few recurring themes or elements. Virek hires a female protagonist to find the source of some mysterious artwork. Bigend hires a female protagonist to find the source of some mysterious artsy footage. Bigend hires a female protagonist to find the source of some mysterious clothing brand. There's a definite formula.

I think there's a point where 'recurring' crosses into 'repetitive', and Agency crossed that line.

The trilogy starts with the Peripheral, a certified banger, one that got made into a decent TV adaptation. It has multiple protagonists, blending a fairly weird distant-future Earth with a much more relatable near-future one, using a pretty clever concept where the future can communicate with the past (including data streams used to operate peripheral devices) but can't actually change it, and therefore engage with it as basically a quirky hobby. But only for the handful of people with the money and connections to access a mysterious server.

It features some atmospheric settings like a floating island made of trash, inhabited by mutants. There's a largely empty London that is recovering from The Jackpot, an unspecified series of disasters that led to near total social collapse. We get some interesting characters… Flynn, living a quiet life in a southern town scraping together a few bucks where she can, working at a 3D printing shop or beta-testing games. Burton, her brother, recovering from a brain injury during a stint with an elite Marine Unit, piloting drones using implants. Wilf, a polite, somewhat passive bullshit artist. Lowbeer, an imposing and seemingly omniscient detective who's decided to investigate the murder of Wilf's ex-girlfriend, a famous performance artist.

We have interesting characters and worldbuilding in the first book, so what's the second book bring? Well, nothing new. That's the problem.

It's pretty much the same set of characters, except their arcs are done so they're not particularly interesting. The main new protagonist, Verity, is simply boring. She doesn't have Cayce's weird talent/phobia, or backstory. She's not a former rock star. She's not an ex-cop who had to shoot people, or a hotshot hacker looking to make a name for themselves. She's just… a chick with a job. She tests software.

The software she tests is supposed to be exciting, I think we were supposed to be wowed by the idea of very capable, seemingly sentient AI that taps into the internet and can basically get shit done. But we saw those AI's already in Mona Lisa Overdrive, and other books. We already saw an AI evolve into sentience somehow, in the form of Rei Toei in Idoru. We also already saw that moment of wonder and terror when people from our timeline get to experience a distant future in the world of the Jackpot.

The book mentions the word Agency about a million times, to the point where it feels gimmicky, something Gibson had never done in previous books. But ironically, Verity has no real agency. She gets randomly chosen to test this powerhouse AI, and then dragged along into its shenanigans and eventually into the future of Netherton and Lowbeer. She never makes any decisions for herself, she's just along for the ride. Her dialogue is just… her being bewildered. "What's that thing? where are we going? who do I talk to? What's going on??" She never seems particularly capable or heroic. She goes along, while smart people from the future figure out how to gain money and influence in the 'past' and use it towards maybe averting the Jackpot. Except it won't help those smart people, since it creates a diverging timeline. So they're helping out of a sense of guilt as much as anything, and there's no real stakes for them if they fail. There's stakes for Verity, but it's hard to care about her, she's such a snoozer. Also spoiler alert but, there's not really an ending. Everything just… works out. There's no climax to speak of, they just kind of roll across the finish line.

Where the book really stumbles, is the decision to include politics, at a time where I think people were simply burnt out on the 2016 elections and the endless culture war. His time travellers are pushing to ensure that in this alternate reality, president Hillary gets to avert nuclear war. Even though my own politics align with Gibson's, this is the last thing I wanted in a sci-fi book. I read to get away from that stuff, and it feels a bit like Gibson decided to shoehorn it in, as a sort of kneejerk reaction to the election. He had an opinion and he wanted to make sure you knew it.

So, this will probably be his last trilogy. Gibson is 77. I don't know where he'll go with the third book, if we ever see one. I'm a little bummed he'll be ending on a low note though, unless the book opens with Verity getting killed off and replaced with a proper protagonist.