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Is ours the darkest timeline? William Gibson thinks it might be.
Gibson’s last book, The Peripheral, introduced the “Jackpot”, a cascade of global catastrophes that wipes out much of the human race, along with an ingenious take on time travel that allows digital communication – including telepresence – across alternate timelines. Its central character, Wilf, lives in post-Jackpot London: he becomes entangled in the aftermath of a murder whose only witness lives in an alternate, run-down America. Gibson’s new book, Agency, returns to the same fictional setting – but this time, one of the timelines is ours.
Well, nearly. In the “stub” inhabited by Agency’s protagonist, user-testing guru Verity, Americans didn’t vote Trump into office and Brits didn’t vote for Brexit. It’s not without its troubles, though: nuclear tensions in the Middle East are threatening to set off a global conflagration. Stopping that falls unexpectedly to Verity, Wilf, a superintelligent AI called Eunice and a motley crew of plutocrats, spooks and gig-economy contractors operating across three timelines. What follows is a hack-and-app-driven chase which Gibson describes with his customary combination of uncannily convincing detail, obliquely compelling turns of phrase and flashes of bone-dry wit.
Agency comes six years after The Peripheral, an unusually long interval for Gibson. In 2016, he was writing a book set in the very near future, but the present caught up with him. “I woke up after the presidential election and realised the world I had set the book in no longer existed,” he says. Fearing he would have to abandon his draft completely, Gibson tried to introduce characters from earlier works. That didn’t work (Hubertus Bigend, the arty puppet-master of Gibson’s Pattern Recognition trilogy, “wouldn’t even speak to me”, he says) but as Trump’s presidency lurched from one fiasco to another, he began to feel as if the real world had itself strayed from the way things “ought” to be: as it if it was one of his fictional stubs.
“That caused me to glimpse the book I had been writing as a stub of the 22nd century London of The Peripheral,” he explains. In other words, the real world many of us had been expecting at the start of 2016 had ended up as a fictional alternate reality in Agency. What’s more, Agency’s other major timeline – the post-Jackpot future – seems more like the actual future we’re headed towards: an oligarch world depopulated and devastated by disease and disaster.
Grim though that might sound, it’s not a wholly unattractive future. The climate is mostly under control, with nano-bots keeping things comfy for the surviving bourgeoisie – although Gibson points out that their comfort is possible only because everyone else is dead.
So should we just accept that as our fate? Cyberpunk, the genre Gibson is credited with pioneering with his 1984 novel Neuromancer, has been criticised for fetishising consumerism and techno-capitalism rather than presenting potential alternatives. “It was basically saying finance always wins. All you can do is go on to the mean streets, find your corner, pretend you’re in a film noir and give up,” said Kim Stanley Robinson, whose own books strike a more progressive tone. Agency walks a fine line between glamourising the Silicon Valley mentality – with the protagonists’ needs met via a succession of price-no-object, just-in-time solutions – and satirising it.
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Despite his reputation as a seer, Gibson’s fiction has always been more about presenting the sheen and shape of the future than making credible predictions. “I’ve never been in it to promote solutions or possible directions,” he says. He says his job is to interrogate the present under the guise of imagining the future – the only thing, he contends, that science fiction is really good for – and that he hasn’t yet fully processed everything he channelled into Agency. But he was sceptical of Valley utopianism right from the start, he says, when the success of Neuromancer saw him feted by the then-emerging digital industry: “I could never understand where their optimism came from, when people started to speak to me of disruption with what looked like delight. I don’t think it was the guile of greed, there was just faith that it would be okay… and they hadn’t seemed to notice that the world of Neuromancer was fairly problematic.”
That obliviousness continues. In a now-notorious recruitment advert, chief Brexit architect Dominic Cummings asked for “weirdos from William Gibson novels like that girl hired by Bigend as a brand ‘diviner’ who feels sick at the sight of Tommy Hilfiger or that Chinese-Cuban free runner from a crime family hired by the KGB” to help him in his mission to disrupt the workings of government. The author was unimpressed with this attempt to turn his work into self-fulfilling prophecy: he tweeted that both Cummings, and his US counterpart Steve Bannon, “are aspects of the unfortunate future, or present, that the character [of Bigend] was intended to evoke.”
Thirty-five years later, with “problematic” having been upgraded to “apocalyptic”, he does think one predictive element of his most recent books is worth noting. “It posits an apocalypse that takes centuries to get rid of us,” he says. “We don’t seem to have any cultural wherewithal to deal with that. We usually think of the apocalypse as though it’s the ultimate bad day.” Whatever happens next, we’re not going to simply rewind the mistakes our species has made, he suggests, and it won’t be the people building bunkers today who see any upturn, but their great-great-grandchildren.
But apocalypticism in literature has a long history, dating all the way back to Babylonian tales of a great flood. Gibson grew up amid rampant Cold War paranoia, conditioned to expect all-out nuclear war through chance meetings with gloomy analysts and Boomers covertly digging out bunkers. With those expectations having gone unfulfilled (so far), that paranoia seems to have been forgotten, along with the bunkers: “Underneath America is a mountain of buried, rotting food,” he quips. Neuromancer, he says, seemed optimistic at the time because it only envisaged a minor nuclear conflict having taken place.
So is it possible that Gibson is simply succumbing to the way, in his own words, that once optimistic SF writers “reach a certain age and declare that everything is going to hell in a handbasket”? Perhaps, he says, but “all my life I’ve been writing myself reminders not to do that. But now I look around, and for the first time it’s true.”
There are many, both of Gibson’s generation and others, who might agree. In Agency, the post-2016 stub has both time travellers and artificial super-intelligence working to save it from a grim fate. In the stub we live in, we’re on our own.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
