Agency
Viking (Verlag)
978-0-241-23722-9 (ISBN)
'Dazzling, astoundingly inventive' The Times
'Wild, richly satisfying' Guardian
'Terrific' Spectator
_______________
San Francisco, 2017. Clinton's in the White House, Brexit never happened - and Verity Jane's got herself a new job.
They call Verity 'the app-whisperer,' and she's just been hired by a shadowy start-up to evaluate a pair-of-glasses-cum-digital-assistant called Eunice. Only Eunice has other ideas.
Pretty soon, Verity knows that Eunice is smarter than anyone she's ever met, conceals some serious capabilities and is profoundly paranoid - which is just as well since suddenly some bad people are after Verity.
Meanwhile, in a post-apocalyptic London a century from now, PR fixer Wilf Netherton is tasked by all-seeing policewoman Ainsley Lowbeer with interfering in the alternative past in which Verity and Eunice exist. It appears something nasty is about to happen there - and fixing it will require not only Eunice's unique human-AI skillset but also a little help from the future.
A future which Verity soon fears may never be . . .
_______________
'One of the most influential writers around...with Gibson's trademark panache, the story rattles along with great pace and suspense' Sunday Times
'One of our greatest science-fiction writers' New York Times
'A sensual, remarkably visual ride, vigorous with displays of conceptual imagination and humour' The Guardian
'Among our most fascinating novelists' Daily Telegraph
'Gibson is a prophet and a satirist, a black comedian and an astounding architect of cool' Spectator
'One of the most visionary, original, and quietly influential writers currently working' Boston Globe
'His eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen' New Yorker
'Engaging, thought-provoking and delightful... [Gibson] can always be counted on to show us our contemporary milieu rendered magical by his unique insights, and a future rendered inhabitable by his wild yet disciplined imagination' The Washington Post
'Gibson blurs the line between real and speculative technology in a fast-paced thriller that will affirm to readers that it was well worth the wait' Booklist
'Typically visionary, yet plausible and thrilling too' I Paper
'If you're one of those who sees Gibson as a visionary, it's time to be scared - the scenarios he's playing with here don't make for comfort reading' SFX magazine
William Gibson is credited with having coined the term "cyberspace" and having envisioned both the Internet and virtual reality before either existed. His first novel Neuromancer sold more than six million copies worldwide, and Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive completed the trilogy. He has written six further novels about the strange contemporary world we inhabit. His most recent novels include Spook Country, Zero History and The Peripheral. His non-fiction collection, Distrust That Particular Flavour, compiles assorted writings and journalism from across his career.
"Since 1948"Gene Wolfe once said that being an only child whose parents are dead is like being the sole survivor of drowned Atlantis. There was a whole civilization there, an entire continent, but it's gone. And you alone remember. That's my story too, my father having died when I was six, my mother when I was eighteen. Brian Aldiss believes that if you look at the life of any novelist, you'll find an early traumatic break, and mine seems no exception.I was born on the coast of South Carolina, where my parents liked to vacation when there was almost nothing there at all. My father was in some sort of middle management position in a large and growing construction company. They'd built some of the Oak Ridge atomic facilities, and paranoiac legends of "security" at Oak Ridge were part of our family culture. There was a cigar-box full of strange-looking ID badges he'd worn there. But he'd done well at Oak Ridge, evidently, and so had the company he worked for, and in the postwar South they were busy building entire red brick Levittown-style suburbs. We moved a lot, following these projects, and he was frequently away, scouting for new ones.It was a world of early television, a new Oldsmobile with crazy rocket-ship styling, toys with science fiction themes. Then my father went off on one more business trip. He never came back. He choked on something in a restaurant, the Heimlich maneuver hadn't been discovered yet, and everything changed.My mother took me back to the small town in southwestern Virginia where both she and my father were from, a place where modernity had arrived to some extent but was deeply distrusted. The trauma of my father's death aside, I'm convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction.I eventually became exactly the sort of introverted, hyper-bookish boy you'll find in the biographies of most American science fiction writers, obsessively filling shelves with paperbacks and digest-sized magazines, dreaming of one day becoming a writer myself.At age fifteen, my chronically anxious and depressive mother having demonstrated an uncharacteristic burst of common sense in what today we call parenting, I was shipped off to a private boys' school in Arizona. There, extracted grub-like and blinking from my bedroom and those bulging plywood shelves, I began the forced invention of a less Lovecraftian persona - based in large part on a chance literary discovery a year or so before.I had stumbled, in my ceaseless quest for more and/or better science fiction, on a writer name Burroughs -- not Edgar Rice but William S., and with him had come his colleagues Kerouac and Ginsberg. I had read this stuff, or tried to, with no idea at all of what it might mean, and felt compelled - compelled to what, I didn't know. The effect, over the next few years, was to make me, at least in terms of my Virginia home, Patient Zero of what would later be called the counterculture. At the time, I had no way of knowing that millions of other Boomer babes, changelings all, were undergoing the same metamorphosis.In Arizona, science fiction was put aside with other childish things, as I set about negotiating puberty and trying on alternate personae with all the urgency and clumsiness that come with that, and was actually getting somewhere, I think, when my mother died with stunning suddenness. Dropped literally dead: the descent of an Other Shoe I'd been anticipating since age six.Thereafter, probably needless to say, things didn't seem to go very well for quite a while. I left my school without graduating, joined up with rest of the Children's Crusade of the day, and shortly found my self in Canada, a country I knew almost nothing about. I concentrated on evading the draft and staying alive, while trying to make sure I looked like I was at least enjoying the Summer of Love.
| Erscheinungsdatum | 13.01.2020 |
|---|---|
| Verlagsort | London |
| Sprache | englisch |
| Maße | 153 x 234 mm |
| Gewicht | 502 g |
| Themenwelt | Literatur ► Fantasy / Science Fiction ► Science Fiction |
| Literatur ► Krimi / Thriller / Horror ► Krimi / Thriller | |
| ISBN-10 | 0-241-23722-X / 024123722X |
| ISBN-13 | 978-0-241-23722-9 / 9780241237229 |
| Zustand | Neuware |
| Haben Sie eine Frage zum Produkt? |
aus dem Bereich
