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.
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