Agency

Famously, Gibson predicted our future in books like Neuromancer, and then our present caught up to him. Fittingly, his current loose trilogy, of which Agency is the second book, is set both in the future and in our recent past, or rather an alternative past—a "stub," in the book's term—to which people from the future can travel, through various intermediaries. Gibson is one of my favorite writers, whose vision of the future makes you feel so intensely the conditions and possibilities of our own present, but I had forgotten just how enjoyably challenging it is to situate yourself in the worlds he creates and only slowly explains. Agency's alternative past is full of horrors, at least at a distance, but is surprisingly utopian in the possibilities of good will on display. My mind was crackling with thought and pleasure throughout.