WILLIAM GIBSON

The cyberpunk luminary tells us how current affairs shape his fiction

- Jonathan Wright

IN 2016, WILLIAM GIBSON WAS AT WORK ON THE novel that would become Agency. It was set in “a sort of contemporary Silicon Valley moneyland”. He was happy with how the manuscript was going. Then, in June, came the Brexit referendum.

“I woke up and saw how that vote had gone, and for the first time believed it might actually be possible for Donald Trump to be elected president, because stupid was obviously more powerful in the world than I’d ever imagined,” he says. The presidential election followed in November, bringing the defeat of Hillary Clinton. Gibson was stumped: “I saw that the manuscript no longer made any sense emotionally as a contemporary story.”

Deadlines came and went, until he suddenly realised that some of the action in Agency, a novel featuring “stubs” – different timelines – could take place in a world very like our own, but where Britain voted Remain and the keys to the White House were never handed to Donald Trump. He was up and running again.

Agency is centred on the relationship between a paranoid AI, Eunice, and an “app whisperer”, Verity, and also draws in characters from Gibson’s 2014 novel The Peripheral. It fizzes with ideas, yet it’s plotted with the breakneck pace of an airport thriller.

NOT COMING UP TRUMP ’S