Agency   by William Gibson

Overarching concept is good: people 200 years in future able to interact with people in present day through an advanced drone, and have been able to send a very advanced artificial intelligence back which ends up driving the story along almost autonomously.

The execution is awful, especially the pacing. Far too much unnecessary detail and far too much going on which doesn’t advance the story. The movie-making trick of skipping ahead in time needs to be learned. Further, I failed to understand the point of the plot entirely: it was supposed to be about avoiding a nuclear war, but that features scantily in the prose but for the occasional tangential reference.

To make things worse, the book is organised into 110 chapters, very many of which are less than a full page of text. Each change in chapter represents a change in scene. This is incredibly tedious.

Just as with Neuromancer, this book deserves a second reading in order to gain a proper appreciation of the story, but that just ain’t going to happen.

Can only give this a very low re-read factor.