Just finished AGENCY, the second book in what I assume will be William Gibson’s latest trilogy. I enjoyed The Peripheral immensely, this one a little less but I’m chalking that up to what I think of as “the trilogy effect.” A writer would seemed to be a bit… constrained?… by the original story.
I got the feeling Gibson knew where he wanted the story to go. Where he hoped it would go… but just didn’t have enough plot to get there. He’s admitted (in numerous interviews) that he struggled with this novel because he could not imagine Trump becoming president of the United States. AGENCY had what I consider a “happy ending” and for that I am grateful. A few excerpts:
“Kind of a digital mini-self, able to fill in when the user can’t be online.”
“When you aren’t there, you don’t know you’re not there.”
“Hybridization with human consciousness was an unanticipated result of attempting to reproduce advanced skill sets.”
“I don’t exist physically, so I’m no place in particular, no one country. I’m globally distributed, and that’s how I view my citizenship. Lots of you are hearing me in a language other than English. I’m translating for myself, as I speak. I’m as multilingual as anybody’s ever been, but saying that brings up the question of whether I even am anybody.” She paused. “Whether I’m a person. Human. All I can tell you about that is that it feels to me like I am. Me. Eunice.” She smiled.”
“Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable.”
AGENCY was published in 2020 and there has been an explosion in AI in the ensuing years. I asked Gemini to speculate on how these developments might show up in Gibson’s promised third novel in the trilogy.
GEMINI: Given that the final novel in the trilogy (tentatively titled Jackpot) has not yet been released, we can strictly extrapolate from Gibson’s historical pattern of “diagnosing the present” through a futuristic lens.
If Agency (2020) was the novel of Emergence, the third book will likely be the novel of Infrastructure and Obsolescence.
1. From “Eunice” to “The Stack”
In 2020, Gibson could treat a singular, disarmingly human AI as a novel plot device. By 2026, AI is no longer a “character” we meet; it is the ambient environment.
* The Speculation: Gibson will likely move away from the “sentient ghost in the machine” trope. Instead, he may focus on Agentic Ubiquity—where the “Jackpot” (the slow-motion apocalypse) is managed by millions of sub-cognitive scripts that are incredibly efficient but completely devoid of Eunice’s “soul.”
* Clinical Analysis: This mirrors our current reality, where AI isn’t a single entity but a massive, fragmented “stack” of models managing logistics, surveillance, and capital.
2. The Weaponization of “Stubs” (Prompt Engineering)
Gibson’s “stubs” (alternate timelines) were originally portrayed as a playground for future plutocrats (the Klept).
* The Shift: In the final book, we might see “stubs” treated less like time travel and more like Synthetic Realities. In 2026, we use LLMs to simulate thousands of scenarios to find an optimal path.
* The Forecast: Expect the “future” London to use stubs not just for curiosity, but as training data to keep the post-Jackpot world from collapsing further. The “agency” will belong to those who control the “prompt”—the initial conditions of the stub.
3. The “Post-Human” Skepticism
Gibson often pivots when a technology becomes too “perfumed” or hyped in the real world.
* The Pivot: Since the public is now obsessed with “AGI,” Gibson may double down on the Physicalist horror. The third book might reveal that the “future” Londoners (Ainsley Lowbeer, etc.) have successfully offloaded so much of their cognition to AI that they have become “stateless functions” themselves—losing their own agency in the process of trying to preserve the timeline.
4. Direct References to 2024-2026 Realities
Gibson famously rewrote Agency because of the 2016 election. It is highly probable the third book will address:
* Deepfake Geopolitics: The total erosion of visual and auditory truth.
* The Energy Paradox: The massive compute power required to run “futures,” contrasting with the resource-scarce, post-apocalyptic reality of the Jackpot.