In William Gibson’s latest novel Agency, a prequel / sequel to The Peripheral (there are multi-dimensional timelines, it gets complicated), there is an alternate world where Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election. But that’s not even the main story.

My review is at PopMatters:

It is no insult to William Gibson to say that some of his best characters have been at least partially inhuman. The primary exhibit in that galley is Wintermute, the breezily all-powerful AI in Gibson’s debut novel Neuromancer (1984) who bounced around networks and into human consciousnesses like a voodoo trickster. Not malevolent so much as fighting for freedom from the enslaving limits of its creators, Wintermute was less a character in the book than its ghostly weather, the background hum of a wired world given agency…

You can read an excerpt here.