William Gibson’s Jackpot

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.

The Jackpot trilogy

The Peripheral (the novel!) opens with Flynne, in our mid-distance future, visiting the London of a more distant future via telepresence. We gradually learn that that London isn’t exactly in Flynne’s future but is the future of a parallel timeline. Agency opens with the same future Londoners (Wilf, Ash, Lowbeer) contacting Verity in another parallel timeline. Communication between the three is possible, but physical travel isn’t. Neither, really, is time travel in its classical sense, because the communication channel, once open, locks in a fixed relationship between clock times in each world.

Many-worlds cosmologies like this are not new to physics or SF but Gibson has set up these three as a way of exploring our own possible futures. Could we get to Wilf’s world from Verity’s? Or from Flynne’s? Or, implicitly, from our own? And do we want to?

Wilf’s London, about 2130, is separated from Flynne’s rural USA, about 2060, by an abyss he calls the Jackpot. Gibson fudges dates slightly between the two books but his Jackpot isn’t clearly delimited by big events so its dates are somewhat arbitrary anyway; ‘most of the second half of this century’ is about as accurate as we can be.

The Jackpot

Wilf tells Flynne about the Jackpot during his first (telepresence) visit to her world. She takes his drone with her as she goes to sit on a garden bench in the moonlight:

And first of all that it was no one thing. That it was multicausal, with no particular beginning and no end. More a climate than an event, so not the way apocalypse stories liked to have a big event …

It was androgenic, he said … Not that they’d known what they were doing … And in fact the actual climate, the weather, caused by there being too much carbon, had been the driver for a lot of other things. … it killed 80 percent of every last person alive, over about forty years. …

No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war. 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 than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. …

In the end, new science saved the remaining people from a total collapse of industrial civilisation; but the new society built on the ruins of the old was a brutal kleptocracy.

Gibson is not alone

Dystopias have been a mainstay of speculative fiction since the genre existed (eco-collapse, the current flavour, inherits most of the tropes of post-nuclear dystopias). Conflict drives narrative, so such settings make for good stories. That doesn’t mean the settings aren’t credible, unfortunately, and in fact the setting of any novel (or movie) has to be credible enough or the reader (or viewer) will not engage with it.

Collapse novels already covered here on Green Path include Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife, Campbell’s Capricorn Sky and Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future (which is rather different in that it is serious futurism lightly disguised as fiction). But novelists like these have plenty of company on the nonfiction side of the aisle, and from a wide variety of disciplines. A few examples:

• The politician: Climate Justice by Mary Robinson
• The economist: A Banquet of Consequences – reloaded by Satyajit Das
• The geopolitical strategist: The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan

But what really makes Gibson’s Jackpot seem likelier is that each of these authors, along with many others, points to a different reason for tough times ahead – demographics, climate change, pollinator loss, resource depletion, breakdown of the social contract, pandemics. The list is long, and almost any combination of them is a Jackpot, even without factoring in any domino effects.

Fortunately, the future is not set in stone

One of science’s success stories is the computer modelling which gives us vastly improved predictions of changes in our climate. It works by running several simulations of the future, with minor changes, and seeing what usually happens. Asimov suggested, 80 years ago, the possibility of applying a similar approach to human communities. Our technology is now capable of it, at last, and I wonder if anyone has put it into practice. Meanwhile, we have Gibson and his peers.

Gibson’s view is that futures with Jackpots are far more likely than futures without them, but that people in the present can still mitigate the impending collapse – that they (we) in fact always have agency, the power to change outcomes.

That, I think, is our challenge and our task: to heed the warning signs and choose a better future.