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Agency
- Narrated by: Lorelei King
- Length: 10 hrs and 12 mins
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Agency
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Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene - it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society.
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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The Difference Engine is an alternate history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is a prime example of the steampunk sub-genre; It posits a Victorian Britain in which great technological and social change has occurred after entrepreneurial inventor Charles Babbage succeeded in his ambition to build a mechanical computer called Engines. The fierce summer heat and pollution have driven the ruling class out of London and the resulting anarchy allows technology-hating Luddites to challenge the intellectual elite.
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The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume epic, the tale of a young Severian, an apprentice to the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession - showing mercy towards his victim.
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William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, with his work ranging from his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, to his more recent contemporary best sellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly 30 years, though, Gibson has been sought out by widely varying publications for his insights into contemporary culture.
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 68
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 64
Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran's benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC's elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there's a job he's supposed to do - a job Flynne didn't know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her.
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Spook Country
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 11
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 11
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Bobby Chombo is a "producer" and an enigma. In his day job, Bobby is a troubleshooter for manufacturers of military navigation equipment. He refuses to sleep in the same place twice. He meets no one. Hollis Henry, an investigative journalist, has been told to find him.
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- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 234
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 193
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Twenty years ago, it was as if someone turned on a light. The future blazed into existence with each deliberate word that William Gibson laid down. The winner of Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick Awards, Neuromancer didn't just explode onto the science fiction scene - it permeated into the collective consciousness, culture, science, and technology.Today, there is only one science fiction masterpiece to thank for the term "cyberpunk," for easing the way into the information age and Internet society.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Narration was dreadful, book was excellent.
- By WarriorsDawn on 2018-12-06
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-
The Difference Engine
- Written by: William Gibson, Bruce Sterling
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 14 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 6
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 6
The Difference Engine is an alternate history novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It is a prime example of the steampunk sub-genre; It posits a Victorian Britain in which great technological and social change has occurred after entrepreneurial inventor Charles Babbage succeeded in his ambition to build a mechanical computer called Engines. The fierce summer heat and pollution have driven the ruling class out of London and the resulting anarchy allows technology-hating Luddites to challenge the intellectual elite.
Written by: William Gibson, and others
-
The Shadow of the Torturer
- The Book of the New Sun, Book 1
- Written by: Gene Wolfe
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 12 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall4 out of 5 stars 76
-
Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 69
-
Story4 out of 5 stars 68
The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume epic, the tale of a young Severian, an apprentice to the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession - showing mercy towards his victim.
Gene Wolfe's "The Book of the New Sun" is one of speculative fiction's most-honored series. In a 1998 poll, Locus Magazine rated the series behind only "The Lord of the Rings" and The Hobbit as the greatest fantasy work of all time.
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5 out of 5 stars
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My new favorite book series
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Written by: Gene Wolfe
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- Written by: William Gibson
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- Length: 5 hrs and 19 mins
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 1
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 1
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William Gibson is known primarily as a novelist, with his work ranging from his groundbreaking first novel, Neuromancer, to his more recent contemporary best sellers Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History. During those nearly 30 years, though, Gibson has been sought out by widely varying publications for his insights into contemporary culture.
Written by: William Gibson
Publisher's Summary
An instant New York Times best seller
"One of the most visionary, original, and quietly influential writers currently working" (The Boston Globe) returns with a sharply imagined follow-up to the New York Times best-selling The Peripheral.
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. 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.
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. "Eunice", the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and a canny grasp of combat strategy. 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.
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. His boss, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice are her current project. 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.
What the critics say
“His eye for the eerie in the everyday still lends events an otherworldly sheen.” (The New Yorker)
“William Gibson can craft sentences of uncanny beauty, and is our great poet of crowds.” (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review)
“Like Pynchon and DeLillo, Gibson excels at pinpointing the hidden forces that shape our world.” (Details)
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What listeners say about Agency
Average Customer RatingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance3 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Werdna Bancam
- 2020-07-28
loved it but it's flawed
Loved it, but it was a bit of a struggle to finish. The reader was clear and skillful but her accents and voices were artificial and too similar to each other. William Gibson's writing was brilliant but the unconventional format he chose made the narrative hard to follow at times.
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Mike Reiter
- 2020-06-15
A decent cyber romp
As in a typical Gibson story there is an AI. Also as is typical in a Gibson story, the AI is nominally female. I always wondered why he never just made them gender-less. I could never fathom why an AI would care one way or another, and if it did, it would probably a gender distinction far removed from what we understand as gender. At least in this book he gives a reason why the AI is nominally female.
Eunice is the AI. She is the commercial offspring of a military project. Verity is an app whisperer hired to test Eunice. There are some people from another timeline, various shady entities who are trying to disable Eunice and those that know about her, and the group that is protecting Verity from those people.
The story starts off very well. Eunice gaining sentience works well. The side plot of the background of the people from another timeline is interesting. Eunice being female plays into the narrator's voice. Lorelei King turns in a good performance and does well with the material. I would have given this book five stars but about a third of the way through the main protagonist, Verity, becomes less of a participant and more of a fragile, inanimate object to be protected. A lot of things happen around her, which although she is the focus of, she is not a real participant in. It is too bad Gibson couldn't find something for her to do, not even necessarily action, but even analysis, coding, anything.
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Sergeminator
- 2020-05-08
Not what I expected story-wise
The performance is great and it's a good concept but the way the story evolves was very lukewarm.
I didn't realize its a sequel so maybe reading the previous one helps get more engaged, but it wasn't legendary at all
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- corey
- 2020-02-05
A fitting continuance from the peripheral
William Gibson doing what he does best. Entertaining thought provoking all I could of asked for is more!
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story3 out of 5 stars
- Clear Menser
- 2020-02-06
pretty good, not his best
still, happy to have a timely instalment of the good stuff
felt like a lot more blocking and precise movement than ideas or plot
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance4 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Jersey
- 2020-03-05
William Gibson does it again!!!
I’m a long-time fan of William Gibson’s work. As always, I don’t want to reach the end of the book, but i also can’t wait for the ending!!!. I listened to ‘Agency’ as a stand alone audio book and then again after I reread ‘The Perpheral.’ What a lovely ride! A side note: Gibson’s earlier works were read by Robertson Dean, but I much prefer Lorelei Dean....
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1 person found this helpful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mr
- 2020-04-30
Perfect near future sci-fi
‘Pattern recognition’ has been one of my favourite books, and I think this matches it. Interesting characters with complex motivations, and lots of small, almost throwaway details that place it in a believable world almost (but not quite) exactly like our own.
Manages to be an engaging cerebral thriller without a lot actually happening - which I would normally find quite tedious - but here it seems to work, like it did in ‘Pattern recognition’.
One of the few fiction books that’s ambivalent about AI - not shown as good or bad, apocalyptic or a saviour, but something that could be either (or both). Also includes one spectacular dig at US and UK politics that I did NOT see coming.
Highly recommended.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- Mark Harcourt
- 2022-12-02
Top notch!
Having been captured by the first book,(The Peripheral), I had to re-enter this world , so well animated by Lorelei King. Another engrossing tale performed by an exceptional talent. The performance canters along telling a story of depth and imagination, leaving me looking for the next...
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Overall4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story4 out of 5 stars
- Amazon Customer
- 2023-02-18
If you can’t wait for season 2
I listened after watching Season 1 of the Peripheral. It works without having read the first book, but looking up the characters again really helped— there are a ton! A little hard to keep track of. Definitely recommend if you liked the Peripheral. Looking forward to the end of the trilogy.
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Overall2 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- Miranda W
- 2020-02-24
Didn't finish it.
I started and stopped listening to this book twice and still have not finished it.
Found I had trouble paying attention and that led to confusion about the plot. Maybe it was the style/genre wasn't for me but I wouldn't recommend it.
The only positive comment I can give is that I liked the narration. That's the only reason I stuck with this as long as I did.
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