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Loading... Agency (edition 2020)by William Gibson (Author)
Work InformationAgency by William Gibson
   No current Talk conversations about this book.   ) Treebeard_404 | Jan 23, 2024 |  ) sibylline | Dec 7, 2023 |  ) keithostertag | Sep 20, 2023 | Great writing, really interesting premise and amazingly textured world building. ( ) amberwitch | Jun 11, 2023 | A few of Gibson's tics are more obvious here, and there aren't as many new ideas to chew over, but Agency just goes down so easy. I wouldn't put it quite on the plane of the great airport novels of the 20th century, but will say it's the closest the 21st century has come (for me). ( ) danieljensen | May 25, 2023 |
 From his beginnings in 1984’s Neuromancer, Gibson has offered the struggle for agency as an unacknowledged, quietly devastating war – fought by hackers, gig economy workers, off-gridders and their networks – against the algorithm, against the manipulation of our needs, our personal information and our appetites, by big data and gangster capital. If he was “prescient” back then, he’s right on the ball now, when it’s so much harder to believe in those loose human associations he imagined in the 1990s, whose combination of technical nous and cultural know-how enabled them to quickly distinguish the real from the sucker fantasy. But there's no boom. His bomb ticks and ticks, then hangs there, suspended between hope and catastrophe, because his stories these days are all about highly competent people being brought together to solve a problem — drawn in like rays inevitably converging, arriving just before everything explodes. His conflicts are intellectual, occasionally solved by the swift application of overwhelming violence, but more often seeing victory come as the natural result of more intelligent systems processes; through more effective usage of human capital and resources. And the good guys win simply because they are smarter and geekier and just so much cooler than the bad guys could ever hope to be. Regardless of Gibson’s shifting ratios of glee to cynicism, he can always be counted on to show us our contemporary milieu rendered magical by his unique insights, and a future rendered inhabitable by his wild yet disciplined imagination.  Someone else might’ve made this fresh and clever, but from this source, it’s an often dull and pointless-seeming retread. Belongs to SeriesHas as a commentary on the textAwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
Science Fiction.
Thriller.
HTML:AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER â??ONE OF THE MOST VISIONARY, ORIGINAL, AND QUIETLY INFLUENTIAL WRITERS CURRENTLY WORKINGâ?ť* returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times bestselling The Peripheral. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term â??cyberspaceâ?ť and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is â??spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.â?ť Now Gibson is back with Agencyâ??a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. â??Eunice,â?ť the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers donâ??t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that itâ??s best they donâ??t. Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice canâ??t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it. No library descriptions found. |
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 Google Books — Loading...GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999LC ClassificationRatingAverage: (3.65)
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