Agency

November 4, 2019
Cyberpunk pioneer Gibson disappoints with this inventive but jumbled prequel to The Periphery. In 2017, gifted “app whisperer” Verity Jane is hired to beta test a pair of eye-glasses that double as an artificial intelligence assistant named Eunice. As Eunice’s personality and capabilities grow, Verity decides to hide the AI’s rapid development from her mysterious new employers. She can’t keep the secret for long, however, as agents from a century into the future descend to make sure that Eunice­—a misplaced technology from their time—doesn’t start a nuclear war. Though the writing is packed with intriguing concepts and characters, the scrambled timelines and shifting narrative perspective make an already complicated plot even harder to follow. The characters from the future fall flat, especially in comparison to the dynamic, fully-realized personalities of Verity and Eunice. Cyberpunk fans looking to dive into the “what-if’s” of an alternate timeline will be as enraptured as ever by Gibson’s imagination, but they’ll be left with more questions than answers.

Narrator Lorelei King had her job cut out for her while performing an audiobook with many unfamiliar futuristic concepts such as microscopic machines that build items from molecules in the air and all sorts of permutations of the cyberworld. But she makes it sound easy, not even pausing at the strange words, confident they will be understood in context. She is equally comfortable with slang from some not-too-distant future and the new communications methods that have been developed. She is perfect as heroine Verity Jane, who is asked to test a new "digital assistant" named Eunice. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) learns at an exponential rate and is soon sought after by nefarious people on two continents. Suspenseful, titillating, and more than a little scary. M.S. � AudioFile 2020, Portland, Maine