Agency

Mwoah, hmmm. Een zeer langverwacht boek, het had oorspronkelijk al begin 2018 uit moeten komen. Begonnen met schrijven in 2016 gooide de Amerikaanse verkiezing roet in het eten, en werd het boek overhoop gegooid.

Het is min of meer een vervolg op The Peripheral, al denk ik dat dit boek zonder dat te hebben gelezen niet echt goed te begrijpen is. Het speelt in drie parallelle werkelijkheden, waarin er een is waarin Trump heeft gewonnen en eentje waarin Clinton won.

Wel min of meer achter elkaar uitgelezen maar erg bevredigend was/werd het uiteindelijk niet. Ik had nog de hoop dat het einde het tot 4* zou maken, maar alhoewel het idee wel aardig is, voelt het teveel on-af. Op detail-nivo overigens een prima boek, met heel veel fijne detailbeschrijvingen van mogelijke toekomsten.

“He went into the bedroom for his jacket, put it on, setting it to medium warmth.”

Solid continuation of the trilogy. Maybe a bit more fun?

This is a fantastic sequel to Gibson's The Peripheral.
Set in a different time period but with some of the same characters showing back up in this one.
These books are a little bit difficult to follow because you're just thrown in with no explanation of anything, but once you get to know the characters and the general concepts the characters are dealing with (alternate reality “stubs”, peripherals, and the like).

Really looking forward to #3 in the series.
So far, this is my favorite WGibson work since the Sprawl series, which I re-read just a couple of years ago.

Breakneck thriller pace, as Gibson does, nobody knows quite what's going on but goes with it. Time travelish, fancy AI, hipster coffee, motorcycle rides, and saving the world - obliquely.

Yeah, shrugging, I don't know. Not bad, not super great either. A solid read, with a nice story and that's it. Very likely I will forget everything in a view months I like I completely forgot about the first book.

If there is nothing else to read, then yes, else put it back for some other time

It would have been a vastly superior book if Gibson had spent less time on Twitter and Google Maps as he was writing it.

Gibson always delivers.

This is a follow up to The Peripheral, which is up there as one of Gibson's best books for me. I'm assuming he is working on his usual template of loosely connected trilogies and that there will be another to come in this world. Being a return visit, this doesn't have the same kind of impact or originality as The Peripheral did, but there is plenty here that fans will appreciate; his traditional sparse prose, meticulous examination of detail in fashion and tech, and big, big, ideas. The usual labyrinthine, noirish plot is present and correct as well - it took me until half way through the book before I felt I had a handle on what was going on. It feels like a much more optimistic book than its predecessor (as long as you don't look at some of the details too closely), and I am left looking forward to a putative third volume. Basically, Gibson is one of our finest writers, and any new book should be celebrated.