"He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots."

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	• Pattern Recognition William Gibson Berkley Trade, 2004 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 270 reviews view larger image
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Meme_Marketing

Long fascinated with meme theory, a lifelong student of marketing, and a unwitting participant in the rise of corporate pop, I found this book fascinating.

This book finds Cayce Pollard, brand-guru (and brand_llergic) embroiled in a voyeresque mystery involving fashionistas, double-agents and corporate opportunists looking to turn underground film snippets into the next and best channel to the unsuspecting masses.

I recommend this book to those who cringe when they hear their favorite songs morphed, slashed, corrupted and slathered over the top of Mitsubishi's new model careening through generic stretches of blacktop.

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The Future is Here, We Caught it, or Rather it Caught Us

Cayce Pollard has the uncanny ability to see a new logo and at first sight know whether or not it will be successful, but she also suffers panic attacks when she see bad ones, especially commercial bad ones, like the Michelin Man for example. She is also hampered by the memory of her father's mysterious disappearance in New York on that fateful September day in 2001 that changed everything for America.

In her spare time she is an obsessive follower of the footage, an underground film that is being released piece meal and out of order on the internet, hidden in old archives or ghost sites where only those in the know will find it. The footage has gained a huge cult following, its devotees endlessly discussing it in chat rooms.

Cayce has been hired by the super rich Hubertus Bigend, head of Blue Ant, a very sleek and top of the line advertising agency, to pass judgment on a new logo for a popular footwear product. She arrives tired and jetlagged in London, sees Bigend's brand and says no, it won't go. Bigend, instead of crying in his beer, hires Cayce to track down the makers of the footage. As it turns out the man is a footagehead, too.

Cayce suspects Bigend wants to find the footage maker to exploit the marketing potential of its huge underground success, but she reluctantly agrees and is off on a quest to find what may be the best kept secret in the world. In a search that takes her to Tokyo and Moscow she discovers that the footage actually contains encrypted information and there is far more to it than anybody had imagined.

This thought provoking book is William Gibson at his very best. In this one, he's not writing about an imagined future, the future his here, we caught it, or rather it's caught us. These people on these pages are his best characters, so real I'm still thinking about them and it's been almost a month since I closed the pages, but I'll be starting it again soon. This book is a keeper, one I'll read over and over again. It's a detective story, a thriller and as I said, a thought provoker. It's outstanding.

Reviewed by Stephanie Sane

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Years later...

I read this book more a little more than 2 years ago and finished it on an airplane. I was so obviously happy reading it that the person sitting next to me asked about it. I ended up giving it to him since after I described it he really wanted to read it, but have regretted ever since not having my own copy. I am not a traditional science fiction fan, but this is a book I'm still thinking about.

"He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots."

One of the first things that struck me about Pattern Recognition was how hard it was to date. Despite all the little cues that told me that it was set in the present, Gibson makes the world so strange that I can hardly recognize it.

Welcome to the world of Cayce Pollard.

Named by her mother after the famous psychic Edgar Cayce, Cayce seems to share his talent for prophecy. She is a prophet of patterns. Given a brand logo, she can say with certainty whether it has the ability to embed itself into the fabric of cool and everyday life. As attuned as she is to brand and image, Cayce attempts to divest herself as much as possible of all logos or markings. She even has a strong phobia response to certain patterns, certain logos, certain designs.

With her talent for pattern recognition, Cayce is ideal for a role as a new kind of detective. She turns her talent for coolhunting to the search for the author of compelling and unattributed footage that has been appearing online and developed a cult following.

Gibson does a masterful job of bringing the reader into her world. His prose skills are still nearly unmatched in speculative fiction. His inimitable minimalist style is in top form with this novel. While most of his contemporaries are struggling with making the future familiar, Gibson estranges us from our here-and-now-- no mean feat.

How well you respond to this book will be partly determined by how much you like the minimalism of the project. In one passage of the book, an artist pares a film down by stages into a single image-- obsessively looking for the kernal of truth. There is some of that to the plot points here and it is not always comfortable to read. I found that while I liked Cayce and responded to her well, I was not able to follow her in the obsession with the footage and was ultimately not as interested as I should have been in the identity of the maker.

Recommended for Gibson fans and fans of speculative fiction. It would also make an interesting gift for friends interested in memes, branding, or popular culture.

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reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, page 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19

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