I have attempted William Gibson before; I did not enjoy Neuromancer at all. But Agency is considerably more recent and the premise made more sense to me. Basically, Verity is an app developer/tester who is brought on to field test “Eunice” an AI assistant of sorts, but Verity realizes there’s a good bit more to Eunice than anyone seems to have guessed, and soon mysterious corporate shenanigans are afoot, and there is some involvement from parallel universes, one of which has the technology to keep an eye on the others and intervene if the particular reality in question is in serious jeopardy.
I have had to fight to read my way through this, but not because of the plot or the writing, both of which are fine; not great, but fine. The characters have no personality at all, except for Eunice who may or may not be somewhat sentient. Problem 1 with this is that I have a hard time remembering who is who, and the cast list gets a bit long, and I also don’t care at all what happens to most of these people. Eunice probably has the most personality of anyone, and this might be intentional o Gibson’s part to make a point about people and artificial intelligence, but Eunice disappears for a good chunk of the mid-section of the novel, which means there’s no one really interesting to follow or care about or even hate for a long while. I managed to finish this one only because I’d run out of library renewals and it’s due back soon.
The main mystery of where Eunice comes from and what/who she really is-was does sort of get resolved in the end, but a lot of little side-plots like who might be after Lowbeer and what level of threat they might have ever been remains unresolved; same for Joe-Eddy’s involvement with the potentially corporate evil Cursion (which itself remains rather personality-less, even for a company). As noted above, I get that there may be a point to no one having discernable real feelings or personality, but whether or not this is actually the intended case, it makes the novel hard to stay interested in for long. I doubt it’s because this is technically a sequel either; as far as I can tell, most of the core cast is new, and the world-building (such as it is) isn’t quite as personality-less.