Gibson: finally grown up

books:


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

"Pattern Recognition," beyond being a well-written and enjoyable novel, was extremely prescient. Basically foreseeing the revolution that encompasses globally (more or less) available rich-media content via the internet...think YouTube, for instance...Gibson saw a future that came to be.

Moreover, one of the key threads to the book's plot, that of a mysterious video that attracts a worldwide audience and following, was played out nearly as written in "Pattern Recognition" in the year 2006 via a series of videos that attracted wide media attraction and interest.

This is an engrossing read that happens to have foreseen a wide-ranging phenomenon that, at the time of the book's publication, did not exist.

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one of my favorites

I've been a big Gibson fan since the old-school cyberpunk stuff (I think Burning Chrome was the first book of his I ever read), and I have read and enjoyed most of his work. That being said, Pattern Recognition was one of my favorites. It keeps his noir style, but without as much of the technological fantasy of his earlier cyberpunk work. That is not to say that technology is absent in Pattern Recognition, but rather that it is a more realistic technological near-future tale. I love the way the story unfolds, and keeps the readers interest for the whole book. I read this book straight through without stopping.

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Gibson: finally grown up

Previous Gibson books focussed on the distant future, but his motif is in creating a layered atmosphere of technological gadgets and geographical places and the way the characters are drawn in/enabled by these things.

Pattern Recognition is set NOW, because really technology has pretty much caught up with what he wrote 20 years ago, and the evolution has been quite different in some ways to what he predicted.

The protagonist Cayce P, is a female who is allergic to branding. She is the first character Gibson has written that i've really cared about, he does tend - as do most sci fi writers of his generation - toward blank male non-entities driven by plot, not persona. Cayce is driven by her allergy, she strives to be non-labelled, unmaterialistic, and endlessly practical, she takes pride in her work, her abilities and her independent view of the world. We get a clear objective viewpoint through her eyes.

The Footage is the mystery of the story, someone has made a series of short films and put them on the net, but who did it, and why? The story is more about the way the footage has become a cult item and the way it pulls people together, they way we now cluster online over these highly selective subjects and form relationships around them. At the time this book was written, our society was only just barely legitimising net relationships. Myspace and Facebook didn't yet exist. So for me, this aspect of the story was a real insight that the rest of the world had not yet admitted.

Though Gibson mentions enough brands throughout the book for me to be pretty sure he's being sponsored to do so. The story, ideas and interpretation of the globe with it's interconnected strings being pulled tighter/closer is well depicted.

The atmosphere of the story is drier than his previous works which were almost neon-coloured. For me this demonstrated a more grown up writer. Not afraid to look at people and the present, able to describe an interesting and intricate world without the futuristic embellishments of cyberpunk.

This is one of my favourite books. A real breakthrough for Gibson who was repeating himself a little.

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not too bad

This is my first Gibson book to read. An acceptable read with an overly simplified ending, but worth the $.

reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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