Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson (2003)

I was very impressed with Gibson's Neuromancer. You can't watch the Matrix Trilogy and miss the sundry notions lifted from this seminal '80s book.

To my knowledge, Gibson was the first writer to fuse the paranoid, "fluid-concurrent reality" concepts of Philip K. Dick with futurist projections of a cyber-tendrilled world. Pattern Recognition, however, is not a cyberpunk novel, the sci-fi sub-genre Gibson's credited with originating. It doesn't take place in an imagined techno-future. Rather, it poses a possible techno-present, its material extrapolated from current world content. It's speculative fiction written about today. If White Noise is a contemporary novel in the broad sense, then Pattern Recognition is one in the narrow.

Quick plot lowdown:

Time: Post 9-11. Protagonist Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter. She's hired by top ad agencies to identify popular trends on the cusp of emergence. She gets a unique assignment: find the creator of a series of anonymous video clips -- a sort of hermetic exemplar of viral marketing -- circulating the web. She takes the job. Cosmopolitan espionage ensues.

Quick thoughts:

Gibson is a great sentence spinner. You can almost forget that, like Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition is ostensibly a thriller. It's upholstered with esoteric techno reference and heady concepts like pop-market-culture-as-world-humanity-network, but still a spy tale, replete with the usual Gibson tropes (e.g., foreign mafias, Japanese fetishism, underground cabals, etc.). Those attributes weren't a detriment to Neuromancer. It helped to have a familiar framework to counterbalance the more abstruse concepts like cyber-consciousness. Pattern Recognition, without the heady, prescient futurism, however, is less compelling a read.

That's not to say Recognition doesn't have interesting observations. It presents our media-influended global culture from its two polar impetuses: multi-million-dollar corporate-funded, ubiquitous branding and free, grass-roots guerilla media. And it manages to merge them together in a mobius strip sort of way.