It is hundreds of millions of people driving to the supermarket in their SUVs, flying six times a year, and eating medicated animals for dinner. The Jackpot is the mundane cataclysm of modernity itself. Over many decades, climate change, pollution, drug-resistant diseases and other factors – “I’ve never really had the heart to make up a full list, else I’ll depress myself” – deplete the human race by 80 per cent. His characters call it “the Jackpot.” “It’s multi-causal, and it’s of extremely long duration,” he explains. T might be worrying to learn that Gibson’s latest novel, Agency, is largely a credible account of a coming apocalypse. From an interview in the New Statesman last year: Gibson’s describing the “Jackpot,” which is the background for his excellent recent novels Peripheral (2014) and Agency (2020). In a sense, we caused this pandemic to happen, but very gradually.”

Gibson: “Potentially, but it’s going to be multi-causal, and far more incremental than we culturally have imagined any apocalypse to be. Pierce: “With the new variants of Coronavirus, the slow production of the vaccine, the millions that will refuse to take it, the millions who ignore the slightest health preventions, the steady death march of this disease, we in an extinction event? Has anyone considered this?” Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can't: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner, and the roles they both may play in it.Here’s a telling sign of how bad things are: this exchange between William Gibson and Wendell Pierce on Twitter. Verity and Eunice are her current project. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions.

Meanwhile, a century ahead in London, in a different time line entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. Realizing that her cryptic new employers don't yet know how powerful and valuable Eunice is, Verity instinctively decides that it's best they don't. 'Eunice,' the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. Verity Jane, gifted app whisperer, takes a job as the beta tester for a new product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. Cory Doctorow raved that The Peripheral is 'spectacular, a piece of trenchant, far-future speculation that features all the eyeball kicks of Neuromancer.' Now Gibson is back with Agency-a science fiction thriller heavily influenced by our most current events. William Gibson has trained his eye on the future for decades, ever since coining the term 'cyberspace' and then popularizing it in his classic speculative novel Neuromancer in the early 1980s.

Gibson jackpot