<n>Standard disclaimer<fn></n> <img attachment="cover_art,_agency_by_william_gibson.jpeg" align="left">This is a sequel to <a href="{app}/view_article.php?id=3865">The Peripheral</a> that, because of the wormhole technology involved, actually takes place <i>before</i> that book. The story takes place in an alternate future that had suffered through something called the "Jackpot", which was a climate apocalypse that eliminated pretty much everything we're being told it will actually eliminate, but from which a tiny portion of humanity managed to escape with technology wildly beyond ours. They have flying cars, cloaking technology, incredible AIs, and also a mysterious (supposedly Chinese) server through which you can access the pasts of alternate realities (stubs). They also have oligarchs who run pretty much everything. An extremely powerful woman named Ainsley Lowbeer has made it her mission to prevent what happened in her reality from happening in those of others, regardless of the fact that the changes she manages to make to their future won't affect her own in any way at all. However, she's still opposed by the klepts (oligarchs) of her world. Because the klepts have their domino theory and they don’t even want people in completely unreachable alternate continua to be out of their reach. They can’t take those people's money, but they can ensure that their ideology survives and allows the other continuum’s klepts to enrich themselves, as God intended. This time, the mysterious server has provided Lowbeer and her crew with a connection to an alternate reality even earlier than the one explored in <i>The Peripheral</i>. As in that book, Lowbeer's crew has a powerful presence in this alternate past, not only because they are so technologically advanced, but because their own pasts are similar enough that they know how to make a ton of money (à la Biff Tanner in <i>Back to the Future II</i>). Verity is a young software designer in this alternate reality who Lowbeer feels can be useful in her aims of getting the right president elected in order to do something about climate change and inequality, etc. They convince her that she's going to be testing a new user-interaction software for a high-flying company with shifty and mysterious provenance where she starts working with a military-grade AI called Eunice. Eunice is the key to convince Verity's former boyfriend Stets, who's a fabulously wealthy tech tycoon (because of course he is) to help them achieve their ends. I mean, I get how no-one wants to write a book about boring, regular people, but is the only alternative to write about privileged, powerful, and nearly limitless billionaires? Anyway, they have to struggle against various forces arrayed against them, and end up doing a bunch of logistically fantastical things that you could only achieve if you had a tremendous amount of money and resources, but they triumph in the end and get the right person elected. Gibson does a lovely job of describing his most amazing inventions with the least amount of prose. He almost casually assumes a world where timelines can communicate. Sometimes it’s apparently more difficult to communicate, but he doesn’t explain how or why. He just casually introduces replicators. Good. That’s science fiction. At some point, we got hard science fiction (Greg Bear, Gregory Benford), but then it took over. Anything that wasn’t explained to death was considered fantasy. There are several passages where part of the beauty of them is that they're utterly incomprehensible without context. Meaning is tantalizingly close, but out of reach. Stripped of all unnecessary detail, as people familiar with the situation would do, instead of pedantically explicatory, for an audience that exists not in the context of the story, but in the context of there being a reader of the story about the reality these characters inhabit, to whom the context must be constantly explained. His treatment of AI is good, too. Instead of being annoying and God-like, it feels more like, <i>obviously</i> this is how an AI would work, with multiples copies interacting simultaneously and sharing information. A hive mind pretending to be individuals, to ease communication with those who are more slow-thinking but capable of spontaneity and invention. What's interesting is that, though the book is in an alternate history, Gibson has to inject modern-day conspiracy theories from our timeline that feel a bit jarring. Everything else is so fantastical and then he drops something like this, <bq caption="Page 17">Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line.</bq> It's sad how American authors are so indoctrinated that they all have to mention Russian election interference. Stephenson did it too. It never happened. Russiagate was a lie.<fn> It doesn't matter and it never mattered. It poisoned the minds of a generation. The U.S. is just poisonous to clarity of thought, even for those, like Gibson, who you'd think might be capable of resisting. On one level, this is a story of elites shitting their pants because they feel their bubble threatened by the antics that built their bubble in the first place, but then being able to lean back and relax in the knowledge that their efforts have returned to them a stability that comprises them never having to think about where anything they want might come from or whether they can obtain it, while nearly every other human being continues to toil in misery to keep that bubble going. It's kind of a story about rich people who are mostly worried about other rich people trying to kill them. The suffering masses are nearly completely missing, or mentioned only tangentially, perhaps in the person of Connor, who is preternaturally gifted and not really of the lumpen proletariat anymore, anyway. He, too, has transcended through his usefulness to the rich. One drawback to the focus on technology and ideas is that the characters end up being mostly pretty one-dimensional, even after 300+ pages. Carsyn is wholly unknown. Manuella nearly so. Caitlin a close runner-up. Kathy and Dixon made a drone and drove around. For whatever reason, Gibson needs to list them all and assure us that the whole, big, happy family is together at the end. I'm picturing the stupid picnics at the end of all of the <i>Fast and the Furious</i> movies. I read this immediately after having read Neal Stephenson's latest, so my reaction to its much, much tighter prose was, at times in the reactions to the citations below, nearly ecstatic. Gibson really does have a way with words. <hr> <ft>Disclaimer: these are notes I took while reading this book. They include citations I found interesting or enlightening or particularly well-written. In some cases, I've pointed out which of these applies to which citation; in others, I have not. Any benefit you gain from reading these notes is purely incidental to the purpose they serve of reminding me of what I once read. Please see Wikipedia for a summary if I've failed to provide one sufficient for your purposes. If my notes serve to trigger an interest in this book, then I'm happy for you.</ft> <h>Citations</h> <bq caption="Page 7" quote-style="none">"Vespasian,” Detective Inspector Ainsley Lowbeer said, peering sidewise at Netherton over her greatcoat’s upraised collar, “our hobbyist of hellworlds. Recall him?”</bq> Jesus. This is peak Gibson. Is he trying too hard? <bq caption="Page 8" quote-style="none">“Contact’s been oblique, you say?” “The aunties, for instance”—her pet name for her office’s coven of semisentient security algorithms—“are of relatively little use.” Netherton grimaced at the very thought of them. A dappled Thames chimera broke the surface then, red and white. It rolled, four meters head to tail, lamplike eyes clustered above cartoonish feeding palps. Diving, it left a shallow wake of beige foam. “So you can’t put a team of quants on it,” he asked, “to secure as much in-stub wealth as might be needed?” Having, of course, seen her do exactly that. “No. Even the simplest messaging can be quite spotty.” “What can you do, then?” “Laterally encourage an autonomous, self-learning agent,” she said. “Then nudge it toward greater agency. It helps that they’re mad for AI there, though they’ve scarcely anything we’d consider that. By tracing historical fault lines around AI research here, we found what we needed there.”</bq> That's more like it. We're In the future. Weird creatures. Dirty environment. AIs. Communication with the past. Self-funding. Had to read it three times. Just about perfect. <bq caption="Page 9">They returned to her car, where it awaited them invisibly, a few dead leaves clinging to its roof, as though magically suspended.</bq> Transparent bubble on top, without saying it. This is a refreshing change from Stephenson. <bq caption="Page 17">Could have been the butterfly effect, of course. Though the aunties, in both cases, lean toward something causing a reduction in Russian manipulation of social media. Which we assume would have had a similar result in our own time line.</bq> I love how American authors are so indoctrinated that they all have to mention Russian election interference. Stephenson did it too. It never happened. Russiagate was a lie. It doesn't matter. It poisoned the minds of a generation. That place is poisonous to clarity of thought. <bq caption="Page 23">Now her tardibot answered the blue door, like an eight-legged raccoon in a small antique biohazard suit, its head an unpleasantly folded foreskin-like affair, with a central toothy ring of what he took to be mirror-polished steel. It seemed to peer up at him, however eyelessly. “Netherton,” it said, the voice hers, “come in.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 41" quote-style="none">“He’d know about Cursion.” “Know what, about them?” “That they’re a subspecies of a former fully deniable Department of Defense op.” “Like CIA venture capital stuff?” “Nothing like it,” Eunice said. “That stuff’s up front. Megafauna. Cursion, when they were as legit as they ever really were, lived down in the underbrush. Still do, but their new coloration’s gaming. Sometimes, if DoD doubles down hard enough on the deniability, there’s zero memory left of the original mission. The op drifts free of the department, unfunded, forgotten. Doesn’t happen nearly as often as it did during Iraq, but that’s what Cursion is.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 54" quote-style="none">“I liked the county,” she said, “even though it made me sad.” “It did? Why?” “They’re living in a conspiracy theory, but a real one. Controlled by secret masters. Your employer, primarily.” “But isn’t it better there now, than if we hadn’t intervened?” he asked. “It is, I’m sure, but it makes a joke of their lives.” “But everyone you know there is in on it.” “I don’t know whether I’d rather know or not know,” she said, and took a bite of taco.</bq> That's an entire short story there. <bq caption="Page 56">[...] the microdrone, nothing but the blue of the tarps, then briefly blurred, as it zipped between two adjacent edges. To overlook the Bay, where something anomalously vast loomed in what was left of bad wildfire light, as though the horizon should sag beneath it. “What’s that?” “Container ship,” Eunice said. “Chinese. Not their biggest, but up there.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 62">[...] staring up at a bifurcated crack he’d only recently noticed in the ceiling. Was it an actual crack, or an assembler artifact, positioned by an algorithm to suggest authenticity?</bq> <bq caption="Page 63">“Have you inquired in the county? Your younger self, there, has every sort of Washington connection. Including presidential, currently.” “Of course,” Lowbeer said, “but nothing turned up.”</bq> Just casually assuming a world where timelines can communicate. Sometimes it's difficult, but he doesn't explain how or why. Good. That's science fiction. At some point, we got hard science fiction (Greg Bear, Gregory Benford), but then it took over. Anything that wasn't explained to death was considered fantasy. <bq caption="Page 63">Watching the maker pump a tiny stream of steaming caffeine-free espresso into the waiting cup.</bq> Just casually introducing replicators. <bq caption="Page 63">Netherton said, looking down at the steaming black liquor in the small white china cup, the kitchen’s ceiling fixture reflected in it, surrounded by pale brown crema.</bq> Detailed but not hyper-detailed. Also, poetic. <bq caption="Page 64" quote-style="none">Netherton drank off his decaf, the gesture as denatured as the brew, and returned the cup to the maker. “Would that be your work, then, this crisis?” “Most definitely not. It came with the territory, taking us entirely by surprise. Vespasian’s final stub promises to become exactly the sort of thing he most enjoyed inflicting.” “Can you prevent it?” “That depends on our available agency there. At the moment, we’ve none. The aunties give it grim odds.” “You told me they weren’t involved.” “Not in the sense you’re accustomed to, but there are no better actuaries.”</bq> The beauty is that this passage is utterly incomprehensible without context. It's tantalizingly close, but out of reach. Stripped of all unnecessary detail, as people familiar with the situation would do, instead of pedantically explicatory, for an audience that exists not in the context of the story, but in the context of there being a reader of the story about the reality these characters inhabit, to whom the context must be constantly explained. <bq caption="Page 66" quote-style="none">Stets took a phone from one of his shorts pockets. He thumb-typed. Sent. Looked at Verity, then at his phone, then up at the screen. “He’ll take your call.” “Already did,” she said. “I’m speaking with him now.”</bq> Instead of being annoying and God-like, it feel more like, obviously this is how an AI would work, with multiples copies interacting simultaneously and sharing information. A hive mind pretending to be individuals, to ease communication. <bq caption="Page 76" quote-style="none">“They don’t wake each day with renewed gratitude for that particular bullet having been dodged, no,” said Lowbeer, “but that’s simply human nature. Meanwhile, in a world still subject to the other key stressors in our shared history, and with a complexly leveraged international crisis, one potentially involving nuclear weapons . . .”</bq> Sounds familiar. <bq caption="Page 126">“I’m just bringing milk for Thomas,” he said, drawing one of the bottles from the carrying bag. Sensing this, the bag crinkled, trying to origami itself into the butterfly it needed to become in order to fly back to the newsagent.</bq> <bq caption="Page 200" quote-style="none">“Stub?” “Regrettable expression,” Lowbeer said, “regrettably common usage, here. Inaccurate as well, since your continuum won’t remain short. It appears so to us, but only since it’s just diverged from our shared past. Its birth, as it were. But it also reflects an undeniably imperial aspect of what we’re doing, because we assume our continuum to be that from which so-called stubs branch. The mechanism that permits us to do that appears to be located here, however mysteriously. Stubs, lacking that agency, are unable to initiate stubs of their own.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 221" quote-style="none">“She’s altering stubs to produce worlds in which the klept enjoy less power,” Lev said, absolutely confirming it for Netherton. “It’s art, Lev,” Netherton protested, taking a second page from Lowbeer, “poetry. What happens in a stub stays there.”</bq> But the klepts have their domino theory and they don't even want people in completely unreachable alternate continua to be out of their reach. They can't take their money but they can ensure that their ideology survives and allows the other continuum's klepts enrich themselves, as God intended. <bq caption="Page 226" quote-style="none">“Once again, then,” she said, “the divide between the ambitions of conspirators and the desire, among those bringing us word of those ambitions, to preserve whatever aspect of the status quo they themselves hold dear.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 227" quote-style="none">“My mother told me about you,” Netherton said, surprising himself, “when I was a small child. Not you specifically, but a figure in a story, benevolent but frightening. She called that figure the Adjustor. Adjustor of destinies, she said, for those who threatened the stability of the klept. When I was older, I came to understand that you, or rather someone in your role, actually existed.” She looked toward the white candle. “It was never envisioned as a solo position. There were a number of us, originally. I’m simply the last. Should the klept ever truly decide to be done with me, they need only deny me access to the technology that keeps me alive and functional.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 227">Their tedious ambition and contempt for rule of law would bring everything down, around their ears and ours. They managed to do that with the previous world order, after all, though then it was effectively their goal. They welcomed the jackpot, the chaos it brought. The results of our species’ insults to nature did much of their work for them. No brakes magically appeared then, and I don’t see them appearing now, absent someone free to act, with sufficient agency, against their worst impulses. The biosphere only survives, today, by virtue of what prosthetic assistance we can afford it. The assemblers might keep that going, were the klept to founder. But I don’t trust that some last convulsive urge to short-term profit, some terminal shortsightedness, mightn’t bring an end to everything.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 232" quote-style="none">“Money,” Virgil said, “for Stets, is a by-product of satisfying his own curiosity. He’s still amazed that most people who do what he does are in it mainly for the money.</bq> <bq caption="Page 328" quote-style="none">“They think they’re the only real continuum, the one original, not a stub. They discovered the so-called server first, whatever anomaly allows all this. But they didn’t invent it, just found it. Anybody knows what it really is, or where, they’re not telling.” “Nobody knows what it is?” “Nobody has the least fucking idea, or where the hardware is. Lot of people think China, but China’s just naturally where you’d guess something like that would be.” “Why?” “’Cause they opted to mostly go their own way, in the jackpot. They were big enough, the richest country, all set to do it. Just rolled up the carpet and closed the door for a couple decades. Didn’t need to evolve a klept, either.” “Evolve what?” “Klept. What runs the world that isn’t China, up the line where Lowbeer is. Hereditary authoritarian government, roots in organized crime. The jackpot seemed to filter that out of what was already happening, made it dominant.”</bq> <bq caption="Page 395">Authoritarian societies are inherently corrupt, and corrupt societies are inherently unstable. Rule of thieves brings collapse, eventually, because they can’t stop stealing.</bq> <bq caption="Page 399">Joe-Eddy was seated opposite her, Caitlin on her right, Manuela on her left. Manuela had Carsyn to her left, and something was going on there. They definitely seemed to be enjoying one another’s company. The drone was standing to Joe-Eddy’s right, a few inches from the table, a chair having been removed for it. Stets was beside Caitlin, with Grim Tim, Sevrin, Kathy Fang, and Dixon making up the rest of the other side.</bq> These are mostly pretty one-dimensional characters, even after 300+ pages. Carsyn is wholly unknown. Manuella nearly so. Caitlin a close runner-up. Kathy and Dixon made a drone and drove around. For whatever reason, Gibson needs to list them all and assure us that the whole, big, happy family is together. I'm picturing the stupid picnics at the end of all of the <i>Fast and the Furious</i> movies. <bq caption="Page 400" quote-style="none">“The president,” said Kathy Fang. “She got us out of it.” Verity saw Joe-Eddy smirk. “Eunice says it was the president,” Verity said to him. “The president,” said Kathy Fang, raising her coffee, and they all clinked mugs, toasting the president. Conner, in the drone, thrust its manipulator’s thumb-equivalents up in support, and she heard Ash’s voice join in as well.</bq> I can't tell if Gibson's taking the piss or being nearly inconceivably lame. <hr> <ft>I wrote this was before the Twitter Files buried Russiagate for good---even among the idiots who'd clung to it long after every conceivable bit of evidence had been disproved. </ft>