RavePublic BooksGroff’s earlier fiction is a kind of eschatology, and Matrix is no different in this regard. But even while immersed in the end times, her fiction does not despair. Instead, it hungers endlessly—for community, for hope—for more from the blighted world than it wants to give up. In its insistence that the world should just be better than it is, an earnestly utopian hunger sets Groff’s writing above most ... Matrix suggests that a true visionary has a duty to others to share their work, whether an artistic breakthrough or a plan to lift an abbey out of penury ... Matrix is an artist’s novel, but rather than merely telling a tale of how Marie writes her lais, Groff sidelines Marie’s masterpiece at the outset. Instead, she gifts Marie with another kind of breakthrough vision ... In this collective work, there is a genius burning as intensely as Marie’s own ... Like Marie, I feel unsated, except perhaps by a novel called Matrix. I feel that the absence of hope is not just a lack felt in heart but a deliberate feature of our world meant to keep us isolated from each other ... Matrix is not really about Marie’s art but rather the utopian possibilities that come out of making art or creating something new. It’s about what we might do if we had Marie’s courage to bring ideas into the world, rather than exalting in their burning.
William Gibson
PositivePublic BooksLike many of Gibson’s novels, Agency is a thriller at its core. Everything is breakneck fast, and characters are whisked into corporate-espionage or heist plots with little question. In Agency, this can make Verity seem less a character than an excuse for mapping Gibson’s weird and disorienting world ... trenchantly, Agency dismantles the notion that individual choices and singular human actions can have world-redeeming effects ... Even so, Agency glazes over the intersections of...proletariat existence with immigration and racism.
