William Gibson's Agency and the Apocalypse

I finally finished reading William Gibson's new novel, Agency, last week. In preparation for that, I re-read his previous novel, The Peripheral, which is a prequel to Agency. 

I had thought about doing a full review of Agency, but I don't have the time or inclination right now. Suffice it to say that of the two books, I think The Peripheral is superior; in fact, I think it's the best science fiction novel of the last decade. It's not that Agency is a bad book, but it didn't hold my attention the way The Peripheral did. When I was reading The Peripheral, I found myself highlighting passage after passage that struck me, and that didn't happen as much in Agency. And the ending felt rushed and a bit contrived. I'm glad I read it, but I doubt that I'll go back to it. 

The Quietus has published a long interview with Gibson that focuses on one of the key aspects of these novels – the slow motion apocalypse that Gibson calls the Jackpot. 

“There’s never been a culture that had a mythos of apocalypse in which the apocalypse was a multi-causal, longterm event.” William Gibson speaks in the whisper-soft drawl of a man who for a long time now has never had to speak up in order to be heard. Though a certain edge had crept into our conversation by this point, watching him stretch out on the leather chaise longue of this hotel library (“my second home,” he calls it, as we make our way up from the lobby), it struck me that few people are able to seem at once so apprehensive and yet so intensely relaxed about the prospect of the end of the world as we know it.

“But if we are in fact facing an apocalypse,” he continues, getting now into the swing of this particular riff, “that’s the sort we’re facing. And I think that that may be what makes it so difficult for us to get our heads around what’s happening to us.”

When I met Gibson back in early February, the slow-cooked nightmare of the coronavirus was still very much in its infancy here in Europe. The word ‘pandemic’ had not yet been uttered by the World Health Organisation and nor did it come up in our conversation. But it does appear in Gibson’s (2014) novel, The Peripheal, the first part of a trilogy split between two timelines: one taking place before and one somewhat after an event known as the ‘jackpot’. “No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war,” future Londoner Wilf Netherton explains of this ‘jackpot’. “Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less that they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves.”

Even if you don't read The Peripheral or Agency, I recommend reading this article. Gibson has hit a nerve with his concept of the Jackpot. It hasn't quite hit meme status, yet, but it is now a term that's become part of our culture.