William Gibson burst onto the SF scene with Neuromancer in 1984 and never looked back. He now has a dozen novels and a nonfiction collection to his name.
His visions of the future have always tended to be dark and edgy. Here I’m interested in his two latest novels, The Peripheral (2014) and its sequel Agency (2020), primarily for the ‘Jackpot’ which is pivotal to both. His earlier work falls into trilogies (see Wikipedia for details of the Sprawl, Bridge and Blue Ant trilogies) and a sequel to Agency may be on the way. He apparently intended to call it Jackpot so let’s call the two-and-a-promise ‘the Jackpot trilogy.’
The Peripheral is very good indeed although Agency juggles too many characters and timelines to be completely satisfactory. The recent TV series, by the way, is only loosely based on the first novel. Continue reading “William Gibson’s Jackpot”