Eunice is templated on a feisty, fiercely intelligent and capable African-American woman, and is by far the most interesting character in the book after she disappears (relatively early on), the novel immediately bogs down in exposition, pipe-laying, long descriptions of logistics (she sat here, she put her bag there, she looked at this), and people explaining things to other people that we've just been shown in the previous chapter. Verity is hired by that dodgy corporation because of her reputation as an 'app whisperer' to do vague things with a new alpha build, an implausibly advanced AI called Eunice.

(Not very far into the book, the two viewpoints connect, by a technological means of communication that's never explained in any depth, but looks to the users like VR.) Many of the chapters, particularly the Netherton ones, consist of someone, usually Netherton, repeating something we have just been shown in the previous chapter to someone else who wasn't observing at the time. It's never really clear to me why anyone involves Netherton in events, rather than just going direct he's a go-between and a middleman and an observer, and the one effective thing he does (fighting off a random encounter that has no lead-up and no follow-through) is entirely by accident. Verity spends most of the book as a passenger, being moved around to escape from a corrupt corporation who hired her at the start of the novel. This strict alternation regardless of what's going on and who has the most at stake at the time, and this choice of viewpoint characters, soon begin to work against the success of the book.īoth viewpoint characters are essentially passive.

The author establishes a strict alternation between two viewpoint characters: Verity, in a version of 2017 California where the US election of 2016 and the Brexit vote went the other way, and Netherton, in a post-apocalyptic future descended, quite possibly, from our version of the timeline. In fact, they do almost nothing, and it's narrated at great length. They do almost nothing that has any impact on anything. What it doesn't have much of is a plot, and what the characters don't have much of, by irony that may or may not be unconscious, is agency. This tedious William Gibson novel is clearly a William Gibson novel: it has the effortless prose, the vivid (if occasionally inaccurate) imagery, the geek-culture namedrops, the characters who are outsiders to power and the mainstream.

I never thought I would use the phrase 'tedious William Gibson novel,' but apparently this is the version of the world we now live in.

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