Inequality in the Climate Crisis

William Gibson made his name as the “godfather of cyberpunk” in the 1980s, developing an imagery and a language for thinking about the digital world. In his debut, Neuromancer (1984), he coined the term “cyberspace” and envisioned the space behind the computer screen as a neon cityscape. While his vision is now recognizable in the importance of the internet today (partly due to his performative influence on computer programmers and the developers of Web 2.0), Gibson’s novels began as innovative visions of a very different future. By contrast, since the turn of the twenty-first century his novels have turned to an analysis of the contemporary moment. His Blue Ant trilogy (2003–2010) dealt with the fallout from the Twin Towers attacks of September 11th 2001, bringing together post-9/11 paranoia, espionage conspiracy theories, and the bleeding of military tech into civilian life. His work in the 2010s has taken another turn, reacting to the 2008 financial crash and the climate crisis. 2014’s The Peripheral paired a near-future US with a far future London ruled by a “kleptocracy,” those who have taken advantage of climate and financial catastrophe to become de facto unelected rulers of a depopulated planet.

Agency is Gibson’s latest novel and continues to explore the same London — focalized through the same character, a PR specialist named Wilf Netherton — alongside a storyline set in San Francisco’s Bay Area in 2017 that follows an “app whisperer” named Verity who is introduced to some exciting new AI tech. Netherton’s world has found a way to change and communicate with the past via a mysterious server, but this does not involve a change to Netherton’s present. Rather, it results in a branching of the timelines. The Peripheral introduced us to a branching timeline (referred to as a “stub” in the lingo of the novel) that has now been named “the county” and, given the novel’s games with time, Agency has been described as both a prequel and a sequel to The Peripheral. In Verity’s 2017 a bad actor from Wilf’s time has created the stub by reducing the influence of Russian cyber-manipulation so that Hillary Clinton was elected President of the United States in 2016 and the Brexit referendum came back with a vote to remain. This tactic amounts to an alternate history, an approach very well-suited to the novel’s concerns with climate change and instability. The use of alternate history as a genre reflects the uncertain contemporary moment and the sensation of living on a tipping point from which the devastating effects of climate change may or may not be reversed, as recently summarized by climate scientists such as Timothy Lenton, et al. in their comment piece for Nature, “Climate Tipping Points — Too Risky to Bet Against” (2019). These increasingly urgent warnings prompt us to imagine very different futures — some in which the crisis has been addressed and contained, through the radical redesign of our lifestyles and financial models, others in which the warnings are ignored and the world becomes violent, and soon uninhabitable. Gibson’s choice of genre for this novel is completely appropriate, and its tone mostly avoids veering into simplistic polemic. However, its success is tempered by an optimism that, at times, reads as bizarrely naive.

Capturing worlds devastated by inequality is certainly one of the strengths of this novel, and not a skill Gibson has necessarily been known for; he has traditionally been far better at evoking futuristic grit and grime than the mundane and banal grind of contemporary life for those struggling to make ends meet. Gibson’s protagonist in the alternative 2017, Verity, works with tech but her life has been somewhat chaotic since she got romantically involved with a star architect and suffered the paparazzi reaction to their breakup. Verity has since been renting out her condo and sleeping on her friend’s couch in an apartment of questionable cleanliness littered with tech builds. Gibson is great on the details of...