Agency

Agency is a science fiction novel by the American-Canadian writer William Gibson, published in January 2020.

It is both a sequel and a prequel to his 2014 novel The Peripheral, and the trick of the earlier book is repeated here: one strand runs in a near-future San Francisco where a young woman is testing an artificial intelligence that has been designed for purposes nobody has explained to her, and the other runs in a twenty-second century that has been through a series of catastrophes Gibson calls the jackpot. The connection between them is the technology of the earlier novel, which lets people in the future communicate with the past and to a limited extent intervene in it. Gibson's interest has moved from hardware to influence: most of the book is conversation, negotiation and the question of who is actually driving events, and the alternative history, in which the United States has a different president, is used to make the reader notice how much of the news of those years could be otherwise. The book was originally scheduled for 2018 and appeared in 2020.