Still, the presence of a “gig-economy surveillance crew” known as Followrs (“like Uber. Of course, to a conspiratorial cast of mind, Agency’s central metaphor – that the world is shaped by the pastimes of a unaccountable technocratic cadre – might well seem unimprovable. a sort of upscale Tyvek”, as the book’s single most Gibsonian phrase has it. next-level social media”, rinse with “naturopathic mouthwash” and carry tote bags made of “Dyneema. While it’s Agency’s achievement to make you see how any multiverse would fall prey to cloak-and-dagger meddling, I longed to see what that might actually mean for people outside its tunnel-vision interest in a tech class who “power-use. But it all has to be read through the gauze of a narration fussily insistent on its own intricacy: in the space of two pages we hear of things that are “complexly specific”, “complexly volatile” and “complexly conterminous”. And the action is full of goodies, obviously: invisible flying cars, icky shape-shifting nanotechnology (“assemblers”), a robot nanny transforming into a troupe of pandas. Yes, there’s a measure of amusement to be had in Gibson’s typically careful construction of an implied reader who knows what it means to (say) call a particular shade of grey “aspirationally Scandinavian” or describe someone as looking “like a sturdy Amish farmboy having a healthgoth day”.

“There’s somewhere I need you to be seen, in order for somebody to have the time to finish doing something somewhere else,” Eunice tells a nonplussed Verity it’s like being forced to watch someone jump through the hoops of a video game. But despite motorcycle dashes and VR-enabled century-hopping, our sense of jeopardy all but flatlines as the motives of a vast cast stay hazy. When Verity learns that she must do what she’s told in order to secure “a better chance of avoiding nuclear war”, it’s as close as Agency gets to the “come with me if you wanna live” moment any self-respecting techno-thriller requires. “Syria,” comes the reply, “a complicated place.”). Soon, Eunice goes walkabout, leaving Verity playing catch-up in a chase narrative that draws her into the orbit of characters based in 22nd-century London, including Lowbeer, a female cop seeking to redirect Verity’s timeline away from its villainously hacked course – which has done for Trump and Brexit (hooray!) but introduced an atom bomb crisis (boo!) sparked by bloodshed in the border city of Qamishli (“Would that be in Turkey?” someone asks. Our sense of jeopardy all but flatlines as the motives of a vast cast stay hazy Opening in San Francisco in 2017, it follows an apps tester, Verity, sampling a secret prototype for Eunice, an artificial intelligence project, or “cross-platform, individually user-based, autonomous avatar”, developed by a shady gaming-related startup that serves as a front for a US defence initiative that’s even shadier still.

William gibson agency