"Verity Jane, gifted app-whisperer, has been out of work since her exit from a brief but problematic relationship with a Silicon Valley billionaire. Then she signs the wordy NDA of a dodgy San Francisco start-up, becoming the beta tester for their latest product: a digital assistant, accessed through a pair of ordinary-looking glasses. "Eunice," the disarmingly human AI in the glasses, soon manifests a face, a fragmentary past, and an unnervingly canny grasp of combat strategy. Verity, realizing that her cryptic new employers don't yet know this, instinctively decides that it's best they don't. Meanwhile, a century ahead, in London, in a different timeline entirely, Wilf Netherton works amid plutocrats and plunderers, survivors of the slow and steady apocalypse known as the jackpot. His employer, the enigmatic Ainsley Lowbeer, can look into alternate pasts and nudge their ultimate directions. Verity and Eunice have become her current project. Wilf can see what Verity and Eunice can't: their own version of the jackpot, just around the corner. And something else too: the roles they both may play in it"--

Gibson's lastest novel was a real disappointment for us. It's not that Gibson failed entirely. As a futurist, he remains insightful and inspired. His understanding of AI remains keen and his depiction of Eunice as a largely un-self-aware and powerful artificial conscience has a number of believable twists that make it feel very real. Gibson has also done his homework on robotics and makers, and the alternate present San Fransisco the novel demonstrates his understanding of the Bay Area and start-ups and idealized freelance developers thoroughly. So in terms of setting and content, Gibson is in control. The main issue is that the plot just doesn't make any sense. All of the action of the story is driven by Verity's connection to Eunice and the pursuit of Venity across the state by the company that wants to shut Eunice down, but it's never really clear why Verity cares about Eunice or what bad thing is going to happen if Verity is caught. Why exactly does Verity care enough to uproot her life for several days and commit several potential crimes for a computer persona she met four hours ago? Certainly not for the realistically vapid conversations they had through Verity's prototype smart glasses. And what exactly is the company going to do to Verity? From what I can see, she violated her employment contract. The worst thing they could do is fire her and take the glasses back. Of course, the whole story is told from a spy angle with disguised vans and ambushes in parking lot, but again, why? Why does anyone care that much? I mean, the company actually just turns Eunice off halfway through the novel -- why is Verity even important? This points to the other problem with the novel. The other half of the story takes place in the far future; the premise of the book is that Verity's world is a branching timeline that split from the main one. Again, this is interestingly, if somewhat vaguely and confusingly presented, and the climate apocalypse called the Jackpot is a very real and very strong idea of how climate change could wipe out most of humanity. Gibson is always good with setting. But if Verity's timeline is just a stub of another world, why does anyone really care what happens there? If something bad happens in the stub, does it matter? Is there any urgency at all to what's going on with an AI or a terrorist in a completely seperate and independent universe? And that's the main issue with the novel. All of the actions of the story resemble what you would see in a spy thriller, but no one has any reason to feel threatened or do any of the crazy things they do. It almost feels like reading a book about an alternate reality game where all the characters are players just going through the motions. Unfortunately, a well-thought out setting can't save a book if you just can't accept the stakes of the plot.