But nuclear war is looming in Verity’s stub, which in 2016 began to diverge in two important ways from our own, and we realise that there’s a lot more to Eunice than meets the eye (even her own). The AI wants to know how she knows things, why she does things, why she’s been switched on.

Instead, Eunice bustles into Verity’s life, fixing it and messing it up at the same time, employing everyone Verity knows, from ex-lovers to ex-employers, for what seems at first to be a project of self-understanding. That, he tells her, is exactly what she has been employed to determine. “Is it real?” she asks her new boss, surprised. Verity Jane, “app whisperer” by trade, and new recruit to a startup called Tulpagenics, takes home some of the company’s product, comprising a pair of mysterious glasses, a headset and a phone and, trying it out, is instantly placed in communication with a sophisticated artificial intelligence called Eunice or UNISS. They are a leisure space for multi-trillionaires: the reference to the political meddling of our own billionaires is clear and self-explanatory.Īgency, the second novel of the series, begins with the classic Gibsonian unboxing scene. Instead, members of the klept run them like computer games, or meddle like the old gods on Olympus, manipulating culture and geopolitics at will. They’re not exactly colonies – no money is made, no extractive capitalism takes place. These abandoned pasts, stubs of futures that might have been, are recognisable as versions of the world we live in now. Thanks to the development of massive quantum computing, these oligarchs, the history of whose money is deeply implicated with the history of gangster capital, amuse themselves in 2136 by discovering – or perhaps it might be better described as creating – their own precursors, the broken remains of alternate timelines. His most recent novel, 2014’s The Peripheral, introduced us to an ecopolitical disaster called “the jackpot” and a world subsequently run by the loose, shadowy group known as “the klept”. W illiam Gibson has never believed that science fiction predicts the future: it only ever talks about the present.

The Peripheral by William Gibson