Lowbeer is curious about a particular historical "stub" that has just been opened - a split from the main trunk of time, reachable only in terms of data being transferred back and forth (which is how all Gibsonian time travel works). Our London friends from The Peripheral are back - Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer, her man Wilf Netherton, the whole gang. Inside them lives a cutting-edge AI just eight hours old. She finds a gig beta-testing a new artificially intelligent digital assistant for a San Francisco start-up they give her a stylish pair of steel-frame glasses, an earpiece and a phone. We are introduced to "app whisperer" Verity Jane, just coming out of her 15 minutes of fame as the (now ex) girlfriend of a billionaire VC guy and trying to get back to work. It was a time travel story, but done in a way that only Gibson could: Almost believably, in a way that hewed harshly to its own internal logic, and felt both hopeful and catastrophic at the same time.ĭitto Agency: Same stuff, new packaging. It's a prequel/sequel (requel?) to his last book, The Peripheral, which dealt, concurrently, with a medium-future London after a slow-motion apocalypse called "The Jackpot," and a near-future now where a bunch of American war veterans, grifters, video game playtesters and a friendly robot were trying to stop an even worse future from occurring. His game is living in those spaces, checking out the view, telling us about it.Īll Tech Considered Artists And Criminals: On The Cutting Edge Of TechĪgency, that's his newest. His language (half Appalachian economy, half leather-jacket poet of neon and decay) is all about friction and the gray spaces where disparate ideas intersect. You don't even have to listen that close. Now, William Gibson makes bombs that don't explode.
Somewhere a couple decades ago, he hit on a plot architecture that worked for him - this weird kind of thing that is all build-up and no boom - and he has stuck to it ever since. Now, though, he does something different. The early ones were messy and violent and lit such gorgeous fires. Upended genre and convention, exploded expectations. The lines that follow are loops of brittle wire wrapped around them. Their first lines are their cores - dangerous, unstable reactant mass so packed with story specific detail that every word seems carved out of TNT. William Gibson does not write novels, he makes bombs.Ĭareful, meticulous, clockwork explosives on long timers. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title Agency Author William Gibson
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