Agency, and Gibson in the twenty-first century

This final chapter reads William Gibson’s Agency (2020) as complementary to 2014’s The Peripheral. It does so by reading the novel through an ecocritical lens, drawing on Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016). I also consider race, voodoo, and the portrayal of African Americans in William Gibson’s novels by comparing Agency with Count Zero (1986). Finally, I consider the endings of Gibson’s novels, with particular emphasis on Agency and The Peripheral, but also considering Neal Easterbrook’s critique of Gibson’s endings in his earlier novels. In conclusion, I clarify the trajectory that cyberpunk has taken through the case study of William Gibson’s fiction: from bleak, visual futures to uncertain, affective presents; from science fiction to science fiction realism, and to the future of artificial and information technologies. I situate cyberpunk as a crucial tradition in contemporary literature, culture, and society and consider how gestalt literary criticism has been revelatory over the course of the monograph.