It’s been too long since I read it to clearly remember the details, but yeah - I thought it was awful.
I most remember being disappointed that it deliberately and inexplicably sidelined Flynne, since her character was easily one of the best parts of The Peripheral. I have no idea what the point of that was - it seemed just as if Gibson somehow resented the fact that she was a memorable character and didn’t want her to take over the story. Verity, by contrast, was a very weak character, and I remember thinking that it was ironic that she seemed to have no real agency of her own, and instead was just pulled along by the plot.
I can’t really pinpoint anything beyond that though - as I say, I don’t really remember the details - just my reaction.
Spook Country, to me, was just drab. It was like Gibson laid out the basic plot, which was pretty much just a standard political thriller, then filled in the blanks with whatever bits of technology and pop culture had his attention at the moment. It worked fine as a novel, but had nothing new to say really.
That entire trilogy was pretty poor IMO, and was a large part of the reason that I was so impressed by The Peripheral.
And thinking about it in that light, it’s possible that my negative reaction to Agency was driven at least in part by the contrast to The Peripheral - that Spook Country (and more likely Pattern Recognition) were at least as bad, but at the time I read them, my expectations for Gibson were so low that they didn’t have the same impact.
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