Plot or Premise

People from the future are reaching back again into a version of their past.

What I Liked

When I read Peripheral, I had no idea it was part of a trilogy or that there were other books in the series. I just knew that I enjoyed Gibson’s writing and looked for other recent books by him. I found Agency, and initially thought it was a similar theme to the previous book, not that it was actually in the same universe. A young woman is hiding from the paparazzi because of a relationship she once had with a very famous guy and takes on a computer-related job to pay the bills. She is to interact with a virtual assistant / pseudo game-AI and see how lifelike it can appear, and whether it displays signs of self-agency. The company intends to monitor all of her interactions with the program, use it to improve it, etc. Except the program doesn’t like that, and becomes more self-aware. Everyone involved realizes the program is more than they thought, and the woman is now in danger from the people who hired her who want to shut everything down, others who want to access the program, etc. It’s a race to the end where no one but the program knows the finish line.

What I Didn’t Like

There is a nebulous connection between this reality and the previous book, but it seems to be further back in time. Yet some of the other characters from the slightly later past end up getting involved too, without much explanation if they are crossing old timelines or not. Plus, while the series is called Jackpot, you never find out really what the Jackpot is or why it’s named that…at some point in the future, a series of lines of societal degradation finally reach a tipping point, much of the world’s population gets eliminated, and you end up with a huge divide between the rich and poor — all after the “Jackpot”. Maybe it will be explained in Book 3, not yet announced. The socio-economic manipulations are not quite as prevalent, but some societal stuff happens in the background, far enough back that you are now in the recent timelines of our own society, yet way beyond what we can do even now.

The Bottom Line

More like books set in the same universe than a trilogy