HADRON AGE SF (67)
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April 13, 2023
One in a series of posts about the 75 best sf adventures published during the genre’s Hadron Age era (from 2004–2023, according to HILOBROW’s periodization schema). For Josh Glenn’s Hadron Age Sci-Fi 75 list (a work in progress), click here.
William Gibson‘s Agency (2020).
The author’s 2014 novel, The Peripheral, introduced us to a post-apocalyptic near future in which oligarchs (known collectively as “the klept”) amuse themselves in 2136 by generating “stubs” — alternate pasts — which they manipulate for pleasure and profit. In this sequel, which is partially set in a wish-fulfilling alternative 2017, where Trump isn’t elected and Brexit doesn’t happen — we learn more about the nature of the apocalypse (“Jackpot”). Here Verity, a gifted “app-whisperer,” encounters Eunice, a newborn and innovative AI, while testing a new form of avatar software. Eunice gets all up in Verity’s business, knitting together a skein of individuals and businesses for some unknown reason. In the future, meanwhile, Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer and man Wilf Netherton, both of whom we’ve met previously, become interested in Verity’s stub… because it may contain the secret to improving things in other stubs, perhaps preventing various Jackpots. (Yes, please.) Funny, thrilling, if at times bewildering stuff. By the end of the story, I had the vertiginous sense that Agency is a prequel… to Iain M. Banks’s Culture series, in which AIs take a mostly benevolent interest in humankind, and the only question left to answer has to do with the responsibility of advanced for less-advanced civilizations. Give them agency? Or meddle with their affairs?
Fun facts: “We need, individually, to find those areas in our lives where we do possess agency, and attempt to use it appropriately,” Gibson has said in an interview. “And it seems to me that’s evidenced most attractively in maintaining an operative sense of humor.”
JOSH GLENN’S *BEST ADVENTURES* LISTS: BEST 250 ADVENTURES OF THE 20TH CENTURY | 100 BEST OUGHTS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST RADIUM AGE (PROTO-)SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TEENS ADVENTURES | 100 BEST TWENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST THIRTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST GOLDEN AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FORTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST FIFTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SIXTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST NEW WAVE SCI FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST SEVENTIES ADVENTURES | 100 BEST EIGHTIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST DIAMOND AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES | 100 BEST NINETIES ADVENTURES | 75 BEST HADRON AGE SCI-FI ADVENTURES.