Agency

De: William Gibson

Narrado por: Lorelei King

An instant New York Times best seller

"One of the most visionary, original, and quietly influential writers currently working" (The Boston Globe) returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times best-selling The Peripheral.

William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term "cyberspace" and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is "spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer." Now, Gibson is back with Agency - 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. "Eunice", 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 don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’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 can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.

©2018 William Gibson (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

"Engaging, thought-provoking and delightful... [Gibson] 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." (The Washington Post)

"Superb... Each sentence is a hand-turned marvel of compact characterization, world-building and sardonic wit, all used to illuminate his vivid milieus.... Gibson has an inexhaustible supply of tricks, new stories and new ways of telling them that make him the most consistent predictor of our present, contextualizer of our pasts and presager of our possible futures." (Los Angeles Times)

"An immersive thriller, fueled by an intelligent, empathetic imagination." (The Boston Globe)

It’s alright

This story does not have the heart or the danger of the previous iteration. It reads like a quest log of a mildly entertaining video game. Go here to do that now go here to do that then go back to where you started and then the novel ended.

I guess my final thought was, ok, well I guess it’s over then.

optional

the thinnest story Gibson has written in a while. Really good writing, but still not much happens.

There are a couple minor detracting quirks, but...

...I'm still sorta in love with it. If you haven't read the Peripheral, read that first.

There's an emotional softness, here, that doesn't exist in Gibson's early novels. The latter of which were, as is "requisite" of cyberpunk, addictively and intriguingly gritty.

Don't get me wrong. Agency has grit. It has a great pace, and artful unfolding of narrative and character development. Yet it's paired with sentimental warmth you start to see in the Blue Ant series.

It's badass, it's fun, and you probably won't want it to end.

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Other critical reviews I've read aren't wrong. They have valid points. But, they're kinda hyperbolic, at the same time. What can you say? Gibson has set the bar high for himself, over the past few decades.
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But it's still Gibson It the best of ways.

I kept waiting for the plot twist...

that never came. I was expecting some kind of new interesting twist, and kept looking for it until the very end.

it is a good story it is a good story if you enjoy it for what it is. but it's not an epic Gibson.

Great Reading of a Great Story!

If the father of the matrix, as a concept, were to rewrite the dictionary, I would excitedly read it. His stories are always action packed and thought provoking. King's reading captured each part perfectly, with a lot of district voices. 10/10

The intersection of realties and multiverse

Agency shifts the focus to a timeline where Clinton won in 2016 and where an advanced AI, Eunice, emerges as a near-sentient force. This book emphasizes how small disruptions can cascade into major changes—something Gibson plays with both in geopolitical terms and in the nature of consciousness itself. The idea that alternate pasts can be nudged and shaped, even from outside the timeline, introduces an eerie fatalism but also suggests the possibility of resistance.

The next novel may expand Eunice’s influence in the game challenging the power of both the Clept and the Military. Perhaps finding a multiverse instance where the Jackpot isn’t an endpoint in the eschatology.

enjoyable romp lacking significance

I'd give this story an additional star for a first time author. One does expect an old master of science fiction to produce something of significance. This is not such.

King did a great job with the narration.

A real return to form for Gibson

This book is good science fiction and spy thriller combined. I'd suggest reading the peripheral first but it isn't necessary

Cadences didn't hide the cheaffeur me plot

Story was about a UX evaluator who was emotionally traumatized by exposure to the death of a human-esque AI and thereafter shuttled around by a number of not previously known employees of the AI's almost-sentient shards. Well executed. OK plot.

Near future Sci-Fi as only Gibson can

Fine story of the just-out-of-reach technology colliding with the intricacies of corporate espionage. Very much a theme in all of Gibson’s books, but always a step ahead of our current status in each new novel. Narrated by King in a performance that is well intoned, and very much in matching voice with the main characters in a way that gives them body and agency.