Title: Agency
Author: William Gibson
Publisher: Berkley Books
I
find it hard, in this the year of our Lord two thousand twenty, to take
seriously any novel in which President Hillary Rodham Clinton is painted as a
hero who will avert nuclear catastrophe.
No,
I didn’t like this much, which is a shame, for although I find the plots of
most recent Gibson novels a bit limp, he’s always been an interesting writer at
the level of word choice, sentence structure, paragraph and chapter. A master
stylist, if not a masterful storyteller. But his latest effort I found just a
bit drab, filed with recycled plot elements from his better books and without
any of his linguistic flair, where characters do very little but go around in
circles while the plot resolves itself for them. For a book titled “Agency,”
pretty much nobody exerts any, which might be the point I suppose, but makes
for a dull read.
“Agency”
revisits the world of 2014’s “The Peripheral,” in which people in the 22nd
century have discovered they can digitally contact people in the past, but only
in alternate or parallel realities (since such contact didn’t occur in their
own past). A group of such future-humans then begin to manipulate the course of
these realities, some for shits and giggles, others to try to make them “better”
by avoiding the disasters the “main” timeline endured.
While
alternate reality in “The Peripheral” was a late-stage capitalist version of
the USA, in which the only jobs are fighting in America’s imperialist wars or
selling drugs, “Agency” is set in an alternate 2017 in which Hillary Clinton
won the Presidential election and the UK voted to remain in the EU.
A
woman in alternate 2017 named Verity is supposedly an “app-whisperer”, which is
the kind of unspecific but cool-sounding technological super-ability we saw in “Pattern
Recognition” yet which is never mentioned after the first chapter making you
wonder why Gibson bothered, but anyway, this Verity is hired by a tech start-up
to field test a responsive virtual agent (hence Agency, geddit), which turns
out to be a stolen full-blown military intelligence AI.
What
follows is pretty much just the emergent AI creating the circumstances for its
own birth (giving her “agency”, geddit) plot that we saw in “All Tomorrow’s
Parties,” only told with much less verve or invention.
Verity
and a small cast of characters (including many from a people-following Agency,
geddit) spend the entire novel driving around in circles in LA and San
Francisco at the direction of the AI while being menaced rather unconvincingly
by shadowy operatives whose objectives aren’t especially clear, other than to
menace the main characters from time to time. As in, I’m not really sure why
these people keep trying to kidnap a woman just for talking to a stolen AI—it’s
not like she physically carries it around or anything.
Anyway, in the end the
AI is okay, no thanks to any of these people.
Meanwhile,
the threat of nuclear annihilation looms in the background as Russia and the US
come to blows over the Middle East. This plot line, as mentioned above, is also
resolved without anyone doing anything, thanks to President Clinton.
Yet
a third strand involves the future humans in the 22nd century, who apparently
(and off-camera) instigated the plot by getting the start-up to hire Verity. In
their own time, they are threatened by a Russian oligarch pissed that their
meddling in past realities tends to be aimed at creating conditions where
Russian oligarchs have less power. This plot line is resolved by someone going
to an all-day breakfast restaurant three times for 10-minute conversations.
As
I think I wrote in my review of “Zero History,” I like Gibson less the more he
writes about the present-day. Back then, it was the brand name-dropping that
irritated. Now, it’s the overt focus on modern US politics, especially his
support for Clinton and evident disdain for Trump (though he is never mentioned
by name). To be transparent, like most non-Americans I find Trump to be a
patently corrupt, vain, narcissistic, sub-moronic windbag whose presidency
effectively annihilates any claim Americans might ever make to moral
superiority about pretty much anything. So I agree with Gibson’s assessment,
just putting it into the story so baldly seems crude. As I wrote in yesterday’s
braindead thinkpiece on here, it feels like part of a trend towards incredibly
literal moralizing and messaging in SF. Nothing is allowed to be metaphor and
interpretation, there’s only text, no subtext.
What
are we to make of the characters’ odd passivity and inability to influence the
plot? If this is by design, it comes across as fatalistic, suggesting there’s
nothing people can do to avert nuclear war or climate catastrophe other than
pray a Strong Leader like, hum, er, Clinton, or else some benevolent AI will
rescue us. Which might well be true, but doesn’t really fit the triumphant and uplifting
tone of the end of the novel, where the AI reveals itself to the world (yes, spoilers,
go fuck yourself). That sounds like a recipe for apathy rather than activism to
me.
The
other sour note I found was Verity’s ex-boyfriend, a mega-rich tech maverick
named Stets, whose enormous wealth is essential in arranging all the complex
gadgetry required to help Verity stay one step ahead of the bad guys. This man
is unfailing portrayed in a positive light, charming, intelligent, perceptive,
flaunting the law to help his friends, all for the greater good!
Contrast
this to the Russian oligarch subplot, in which those nasty rich Russkies try to
trip up our heroes just so they can stay rich and, er, Russian. Now, to me it
feels like pure American exceptionalism to suggest there’s anything different
between Stets and the Russian oligarch. One happens to be using his inordinate
wealth and influence to help the protagonist, the other to hinder, but in each
case we’re talking about a class of people whose wealth has effectively rendered
them above the law.
As
with the emergent AI line, it feels like I’m being asked to celebrate something
that strikes me as deeply, deeply disturbing. The only people capable of
exercising agency in this world of ours are the mega-rich or artificial
intelligences. Luckily ours are nice and not nasty at all. Hooray, I guess?
It’s
a bit like “Waiting for Godot” if Godot showed up in Act II, announced he was
actually an immortal all-seeing God, but a nice one, and all the characters
went hope happy.
“Agency” has a strangely positive ending for a book apparently about
our powerlessness in the face of technological and socioeconomic change. All
of that, I think, encapsulated by the bit at the end where the characters celebrate
World War III being averted by that benevolent God, Hillary Clinton.
