William Gibson talks about scrapping and rewriting a novel after the 2016 Trump election

Agency is the sequel to William Gibson's tour-de-force 2014 novel "The Peripheral"; as previously discussed, Gibson had to scrap large sections of the novel and rewrite it after Donald Trump won the 2016 US presidential election. Agency is out later this month (I have a review pending for publication date) and Gibson has conducted a long interview with Sam Leith about the process by which the book came to be -- and almost wasn't.

Gibson's had quite a year, being named a grandmaster by the Science Fiction Writers of America and winning EFF's Pioneer Award. The upcoming, long delayed publication of Agency has also prompted some outstanding, intimate profiles of his life and work (it's been more than 20 years since I profiled him for The Globe and Mail).

The Leith interview is a great warm-up for Agency, which is a remarkable book.

The lazy shorthand with which hes sometimes described is as a prophet. How does he feel about that? An albatross around the neck, an encouraging compliment or just part of the job? Its actually ... It seems to be a thing. But Ive been discounting it actively throughout my entire career. I dont think you could find a single interview with me in which I dont make the point that Ive got it wrong easily as often as Ive got it sort of right.

He certainly gets it right in one respect in Agency: the flashpoint crisis in the books contemporary timeline concerns a Turkish invasion of northern Syria, complicated by Russian interference, after the US pulls out.