While performing her function, she witnesses a murder in which nanobots disassemble a woman and leave behind, well, not much of anything. Her brother, an injured USMC soldier, has a gig providing security in a VR game but wants to attend a counter-protest against a group of fanatical religious protesters so asks Flynne to sub for him. The Jackplotįlynne Fisher lives and works on our side of the Jackpot. Using new technology developed on the far side of the Jackpot, people can hop back and forth through time across this historic divide. For one thing, there are fewer humans left to enjoy these benefits. On the contrary, science continues to advance and new technologies continue to emerge and transform human life. Waiting for humanity at the bottom of this slope is not extinction, nor even a violent barbarism. Just everything else, tangled in the changing climate: droughts, water shortages, crop failures, honeybees gone like they almost were now, collapse of other keystone species, every last alpha predator gone, antibiotics doing even less than they already did, diseases that were never quite the one big pandemic but big enough to be historic events in themselves. No comets crashing, nothing you could really call a nuclear war.

It’s more a case of civilizational decline by a thousand tiny paper cuts. There is no single catastrophe that precipitates this decline. In the not-too-distant future, human civilization performs a slow fade. The idea of the Jackpot serves as a backdrop for the novel’s action. Although speculative fiction was my point of entry into a lifetime reading habit, I abandoned speculative fiction at about the time I hit puberty. That means I read people like Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein, Herbert, Bradbury, and Dick, but had outgrown the genre by the time Gibson arrived on the scene. Nevertheless, Potter’s reference piqued my curiosity so, after reading Potter’s book, I moved on to Gibson’s. More significantly, the whole shebang is in development for release as a Prime video series. We now have The Jackpot Trilogy with the 3rd installment scheduled for publication god knows when. In the interview, Potter mentions the idea of The Jackpot which first appeared in William Gibson’s novel, The Peripheral, and which he revisited in a follow-up novel, The Agency. This book entered my life when I was at the gym riding a stationary bicycle (technically a unicycle), pretending I was being pursued by a horde of hungry zombies, and listening to a CBC Ideas podcast in which Nahlah Ayed interviews Andrew Potter for an update on his book, On Decline.

Gibson jackpot