Agency is a card trick masquerading as a novel. Pick a chapter, pick any of the 110 short chapters, shuffle it back into the book, pick a San Francisco techie stereotype, some postmodern melding of start-up and intelligence tradecraft jargon. Is this your plot? Rinse, repeat. Compared to The Peripheral, Agency is more artful, more authentically voiced as kind of urban technocracy story, but way less interesting.

Two timelines. In one it is the 22nd century, after the Jackpot, an event which killed 80% of humanity and a whole lot of animals, and where the most potent surviving political organization are 'klepts', criminal families. The 22nd century can reach back in time through an unspecified anomaly to interfere in alternate pasts. In one alternate past, a stub in the terminology of the book, it is 2018 or so, futuristic meddling means Hillary Clinton is President and Britain is in the EU, but things are still one minute to midnight, with nuclear war threatened over an escalating Syrian Civil War.

Verity, our main character (I decline to say protagonist. Protagonists make choices and exhibit a character arc), is couchsurfing in SF, hiding from the media after her breakup with charismatic tech CEO Stets, when she's given a new job to beta test an app. The app is strong AI, going by the name Eunice, with expertise in counter-insurgency and hybrid warfare courtesy of the US military.

Verity is plunged like a pinball into a world of crowd-sourced spies, next generation drones, and Silicon Valley couture. Meanwhile Netherton, a public relations flack in 22nd century London, and his new wife Rainey act as of kind of Greek chorus, bemoaning nuclear war and the worse prospects of the Jackpot ahead for the stub. They have their own troubles. Netherton's eldritch spy/police employer Lowbeer is being conspired against by a senior member of the klept, and the whole thing could be very dangerous.

But there's no so much a plot as a series of events, orchestrated by entities so powerful and enigmatic that they might as well be gods. The characters are thin, even by Gibsonian standards. Gibson's best work has a lot to say about the nature of power, the power of obsession, and the thin tissue of humanity in the hurricane of power, technology, and obsession. I follow Gibson on Twitter, and his Twitter, plus the premise of this novel (an alternate reality where the alt-right crest broke just short) signals a terminal case of Lib Brain. There's this notion that the world is going to hell because of klepts, spooks, hidden networks that run counter to democracy. And it's true, deliberative bodies of democratically selected representatives have no place in that Gibsonian cyberpunk nightmare that is our present. But the thing about all the enemies is the triumph of the private over the public, of personal interest over the public interest. And it's not like this takes genius. You can do it with a half dozen guys with AKs in the back of pickup truck, or a half dozen bought judges on the Supreme Court and a cast iron gall. These enemies of the world are not so much superior, it's just that we're unwilling to fight them. And as a counter, Gibson imagines a distributed conspiracy of highly-paid experts coming together to deliver... some kind of fucking illegal art happening in San Francisco.

I'm not sure if it's being played straight, or incredible deadpan irony. Either way, not a fan.