I agree except after Pattern Recognition (2003) was to me the change.

But Pattern Recognition was amazing at the time, but now a lot of the stuff in it is normal. Like Influencers in it was a really novel idea at the time, now considered everyday.

I waited ages after Spook Country (2007) to try and read it, so perhaps it was to late.

Internet changed it all. What he was amazing at, now gets just served up to everyone. The future is still un-evenly distributed, but viewing it is evenly distributed.

That was actually kind of the point of the "Blue Ant" trilogy ("Pattern Recognition" and its sequels). It was supposed to be set when it was written, not the future. It was a type of requiem for cyberpunk because we are living in the cyberpunk universe. With "The Peripheral/Agency" he is returning to actual science fiction but of a type that is very different from cyberpunk.

Why not?

I've read all of Gibson's books, but I found Agency hard to finish.

The book has two parallel story-lines, and very short chapters which makes it a very disjointed read.

The characters were also very flat. For the last quarter of the book, the main character's dialog is almost all short questions and other characters explaining things to her. e.g.

<paragraph explanation> "why's that?" <paragraph explanation> "oh really?" <paragraph explanation> etc.

Unappealing characters. Boring plots. Whole novels based on a couple of ideas. It feels like 90% filler.