Agency is a sequel novel in what will presumably be another William Gibson trilogy. As my review for The Peripheral explains, I started reading Agency first and then turned to The Peripheral when I realised I had come to the story in the middle. Agency continues the premise of The Peripheral, that ‘continua enthusiasts’ in the future – people interested in dabbling with the outcomes of the past by means of a mysterious computer server, not fully understood by those who use it – have created the conditions for different branches of reality – ‘stubs’ – to exist.

Gibson’s previous novel dealt with a stub in our near future, in contact with future continua enthusiasts at the turn of next century. This second novel deals with a more current stub. Verity Jane lives roughly in our time period, except that through the interference of a continua enthusiast, Vespasian, a man with a reputation for making the lives of those who live in his stubs unbearable, a disaster of apocalyptic proportions is now looming in 2017, after he has created, ironically, what is initially perceived to be a positive change: Hilary Clinton has won the presidential election and Brexit has failed to happen. Even so, a conflict has broken out in Qamishli, Syria, which threatens to escalate into nuclear conflict. President Clinton will try to manage it, yet our future protagonists, Lowbeer, Netherton, Ash and Lev, will also try to move this stub towards a peaceful outcome. But in creating this stub Vespasian has managed to go back further in time than they previously thought possible. They’ve now managed to make contact with it, but to effectively manage the situation, they will need an autonomous agent working on their behalf from within the timeline. To this end, they have located an advanced AI from our period that they will nudge towards full autonomy.

In the 2017 stub, Verity Jane is employed to assess this new AI which calls itself Eunice. Eunice adopts the avatar of an African American woman. She interacts with Verity via a set of smart glasses, through computers and through the use of drones. Eunice quickly demonstrates that she can manipulate markets, move money, employ agents to work on Verity’s behalf, and in turn draws Verity into a plot beyond the control of Verity’s employers, Tulpagenics. Eunice’s status as a sentient intelligence seems to be beyond doubt. There are quirks in her personality and the way she speaks. Verity is able to bond with Eunice when she is shown her favourite movie, Inception. Eunice even jokes to Verity about the difficulty she must be having understanding what is happening: My money’s on head trauma. Concussion, Focal retrograde amnesia.

The plot of Agency, like The Peripheral, is straight forward enough, although not as tight. The future protagonists from 2136 may need Eunice to help address the threat of nuclear war posed by Qamishli, but the majority of the plot involves Verity attempting to escape the threat of Cursion, Tulpagenics’s parent company which has acquired Eunice’s tech from the military and naturally wants to monetise it. Added to that is a subplot which dominates the latter stages of the novel, in which moves are made to remove Lowbeer from her position. Nominally, she is a cop, but in reality, she is a check on the excesses of the Klept, the hereditary authoritarian government of the future with its roots in organised crime. This adds a level of intrigue to the story, but detracts from the promised apocalyptic outcome. Whereas The Peripheral was tightly focussed on the endgame – of getting Flynne to identify a killer – the work of stopping the apocalypse happens offstage. Just as Eunice confesses that she does not understand how her various laminae – her subselves that direct much of her agenda without her knowing how – the resolution of the main driver in the story is ultimately unseen.

But this is also indicative of much of the world Gibson has created. Protagonists act from afar, usually via technology. Conner and Wilf, from The Peripheral, both inhabit an anthropomorphic drone in our time line, while each exists in eras separate to each other. Wilf is likely to be juggling the needs of his infant son and wife while also engaging in action in our own time period. Conner is as likely to be splitting his time between his Secret Service duties for President Leon in his period, as he is to be acting as a combat specialist in ours. Eunice acts through a series of agents who carry out her plans on her behalf. Yet Verity, the most present and vulnerable character in the main timeline of the story has the least agency. Agency – power – is not conferred by physical presence, but technology, knowledge and money. Eunice’s first action when put into the hands of Verity is to have delivered a large sum of cash in order that she might have agency.

This issue of agency has been present since the first novel. Now, it suggests a level of autonomy and self-determination that, at the extreme, undermines the basis for a fairer society. Rainey, Wilf’s wife, explains to Verity that in her time period it is within the means of the wealthy to extend their lives well beyond a normal lifespan. For Lowbeer, longevity has been conferred upon her by rich patrons because she is deemed important enough to warrant the expense. Living longer has allowed her a network of contacts and a greater means to information and power. The perspective of those living in 2136 similarly confers a psychological mindset that justifies a higher degree of agency than assumed for the stubs they manipulate. It is suggested to Wilf that continua enthusiasts are a new kind of coloniser, because they assume a legitimacy for their own timeline while viewing stubs as their responsibility. Wilf rejects the notion that his own timeline is no more real than the stubs they seek to manipulate; that stubs are essentially equal. His confidence in his own timeline’s historicity and his rejection of the notion that they are traditional colonisers – there is no resource transaction or financial gain he argues – suggests that though likeable, Wilf cannot accept the disproportionate power his society assumes. But the reality of Vespasian’s manipulation of stubs for shits and giggles speaks to the unequal power relationship; a lack of agency for the stubs. Ultimately, it also speaks to the problem of Wilf’s world, in which the Klept rule. In a world in which all seek power and complete agency, the danger of powerful oligarchical crime families ruling society is a real.

The realisation of Gibson’s world is just as convincing as his previous novel. However, it is hard to escape the feeling that this is a lesser novel. There is little new to reveal to the reader. Some of the language may have changed between stubs – ‘funny’, a word peculiar to Flynne’s time, is no longer used to denote corruption, for instance – and Eunice is a different device (although Flynne’s Peripheral is still used in the story). Essentially, however, Gibson has already established his world. Added to this, he seems to have little to say about the historical nexus which is the centrepiece of his story: the 2016 election and Brexit. It’s clear his characters see Trump and Brexit as disasters to be avoided, but Vespasian’s manipulation of history is essentially unimportant to the plot – Qamishli is a fictitious crisis, after all (the Battle for Qamishli took place in 2016, not 2017, and was not as significant) – leaving the book little to say to readers about the politics of the last few years. This may not bother other readers so much, but given that it was what interested me in the book to begin with, I felt it. The first quarter of the novel is perhaps the strongest, since Verity’s discovery of Eunice’s capacities is surprising and somewhat entertaining, and the developing situation in Qamishli seems realistic and well-integrated. The subsequent introduction of Conner into the story, with references back to the ‘county’ and Flynne, will likely confuse some readers who haven’t first read The Peripheral. This is what sent me back to the first book, since I understood that Hilary Clinton was now the first female president, yet President Gonzalez was also mentioned as the first female president. It’s easy not to have established in your mind the different timelines and Gibson’s world to understand why this is so, given Gibson’s concise style, if you start with Agency. Ultimately, I felt there wasn’t enough happening here – much of the plot can be boiled down to a chase sequence – while the complication of the threat to Lowbeer seems messy. The conclusion, likewise, seems rushed. Maybe that’s because this is meant to be a middle book in a trilogy and some of the loose threads of the plot will be addressed in a third book: how is Qamishli resolved?; what is the source of the secret server that allows access to stubs? In the meantime, Agency is an entertaining extension of Gibson’s world, but it falls short of The Peripheral.