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Agency  By  cover art

Agency

By: William Gibson
Narrated by: Lorelei King
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Publisher's summary

An instant New York Times best seller

"One of the most visionary, original, and quietly influential writers currently working" (The Boston Globe) returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times best-selling The Peripheral.

William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term "cyberspace" and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is "spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer." Now, Gibson is back with Agency - a science-fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events.

Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. "Eunice", the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don’t yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it’s best they don’t.

Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can’t: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.

©2018 William Gibson (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"Engaging, thought-provoking and delightful... [Gibson] can always be counted on to show us our contemporary milieu rendered magical by his unique insights, and a future rendered inhabitable by his wild yet disciplined imagination." (The Washington Post)

"Superb... Each sentence is a hand-turned marvel of compact characterization, world-building and sardonic wit, all used to illuminate his vivid milieus.... Gibson has an inexhaustible supply of tricks, new stories and new ways of telling them that make him the most consistent predictor of our present, contextualizer of our pasts and presager of our possible futures." (Los Angeles Times)

"An immersive thriller, fueled by an intelligent, empathetic imagination." (The Boston Globe)

Featured Article: Listen Before You Watch—The Biggest Page-to-Screen Adaptations in Fall/Winter 2022


It’s not just crunchy leaves and cozy vibes that autumn brings. This fall and winter, television and movie fans also have a lot to look forward to, with major page-to-screen adaptations slated from streaming and theatrical releases. So, as your next listen, consider tuning in to the original works that have inspired what are sure to be our new book-to-movie and book-to-television obsessions.

Editor's Pick

The future is now!
"Six years after William Gibson’s The Peripheral, the groundbreaking writer returns with a follow-up sci-fi thriller that continues the timeline hopping fun The Agency. It’s a must-listen for anyone who is a fan of Gibson’s thought-provoking prose. Award-winning narrator Lorelai King’s performance more than keeps up with the fast-paced storyline that bounces between an alternative 2017 and a future London in a different timeline. You first get to know Verity Jane, an app whisperer, as she tests out a new AI named Eunice and assesses the true power it holds. Then there’s Wilf Netherton and his boss Lowbeer, who play with the past in a way that will impact Verity and Eunice. There’s a bit of a runway before it all comes together but it’s a fun ride the whole way."—Abby W., Audible Editor

What listeners say about Agency

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  • Overall
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    1 out of 5 stars

reads like a treatment for a bad movie

I am stunned how bad this book is. I am currently in chemo and have been using my enforced down time to read or reread all of Gibson (somehow missed a few like Mona Lisa Overdrive when they came out).

Having adored The Peripheral, I immediately put this on Pre-Order and just finished it, despite increasing reluctance to pick it up at any given point. When yet another incredibly stupid and unnecessary character (Manuela) appeared in the final chapters, I was about ready to throw the book and my Galaxy across the room.

The narrator is as excellent as always, accomplishing an astonishing range of voices and accents... or non accents. But even she cannot endow the main human character with anything but a sort of whiny simple mindednes, while the narrative is full of ridiculously detailed and meaningless descriptions of physical movements: sliding across a car seat, washing a face and putting on shoes (yes, many more times than once) . The brilliant internal monologues, characters and connections for which Gibson is famous are totally lacking. I have returned in relief to Pattern Recognition and am hoping the future will bring some return to form.

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21 people found this helpful

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    2 out of 5 stars
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Mediocre and Forgettable

This feels as if it were written by someone who had never been to the Bay Area. There is no sense of place, but then the characters are just as shallow. It almost feels as if written by second-rate AI. Another complete waste of time.

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15 people found this helpful

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Sadly, the worst Gibson has ever been.

I've been reading and been enthralled by Gibson for over 10 years, and eagerly await each new piece. Usually, he's the undisputed champion of writing timeless works that nevertheless perfectly encapsulate the moment in they are written.

Not here. There is barely any story, what there is trods old ground, there is one interesting character (recycled from an older novel), the thematics are the shallowest political tripe, (whoa, Trump is bad! What a hot take) and the zeitgeist inserts might have been edgy just after his last book (William Gibson is pushing Boston Dynamics? My aunts will feel so edgy, after sending those chain email vids).

I hope this is just a fluke, and not a sign that he's washed up. It's possible that I'm being overly harsh, but this one hurts. I'd prefer to live in a world where Gibson moves past this and innovates again.

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12 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    2 out of 5 stars

Science Fashion?

Obsessive descriptions of clothing and everything else doesn't build interest. How many times do you need to know a character's pants are too baggy to accommodate a knee brace? This sequel to The Peripheral moves monotonously to a ho-hum ending where the bad guys are sent packing, and somehow the avoidance of any major calamity in the present-day stub is never fully explained.

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12 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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Interesting concept, now just overdone

Overall, I didn't get what made this any different than Peripheral. Gibson actually pushed the envelope with things like Neuromancer, implying a truly viable high tech future. Now, the tech is here and nothing really new - I kept thinking along the lines of "drone of the week" at this point and the twist of the time travel is now stale - as well as repeatedly demonstrating there's no real stakes as the future we always see doesn't get impacted by those essentially just playing around with rich west coast D listers in the past. What exactly do the people in the future do for real work, anyway? I felt the (tired, overdone as every recent Stephenson 'hero' is) heroine came across as very flat, almost ignorant valley girl in voice acting - and it's awfully weird when the female narrator has better male voices than female. Finally, as in Overall, this just came across as Peripheral Part 2: Dry and Tired.. that's my opinion of the story. It seemed awfully woke and kind of gratuitous that the stolen military AI featured in the story never come across as African American female even though it identifies as one later - queue the wokeness, and way to pretty much steal a minor character from CBS SEAL Team - a translator no less (and yes, it's said the basis for the AI was a black girl translator associated with Navy Special Forces) and not even the kind of strategist that would pull off all the magic techno stunts and basically bank robbery inundated throughout.

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9 people found this helpful

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    3 out of 5 stars
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enjoyable romp lacking significance

I'd give this story an additional star for a first time author. One does expect an old master of science fiction to produce something of significance. This is not such.

King did a great job with the narration.

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9 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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    2 out of 5 stars
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    1 out of 5 stars

who wrote this?

This does not really read like one of William Gibson's stories. Not.... really. Superficially... yes. Did he really write this one?

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8 people found this helpful

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    1 out of 5 stars
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Don’t judge this book by its cover

The Black woman depicted on the cover has a small sometimes insignificant role in this sporadic, incoherent plot is alternative time line and political plots. Please don’t waste your time on this one

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7 people found this helpful

  • Overall
    3 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars
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    3 out of 5 stars

Low quality SciFi

This is the type of SciFi that doesn’t take you deep into the story or caricatures. It’s more like a long short story. But, the story idea was very interesting.

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6 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

Agency. Well done follow up to The Peripheral

Awesome story. Great characters. Hillary Clinton as a heroic figure was laughable. Excellent use of alternate history

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6 people found this helpful