Pattern Recognition - ISBNLookup.com

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
In the first sentence of his first novel, William Gibson penned one of the most memorable lines in the last quarter century of science fiction or, indeed, any literature: “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Gibson invented cyberspace, envisioned the “matrix.” Imagine what he could do with the present.

Well, imagine no more. Pattern Recognition is a wild ride through a world of Hotmail accounts, Tommy Hilfiger displays, Pilates studios: our world. Your protagonist: Cayce Pollard, whose talent consists of a truly extraordinary allergy to brands, trademarks, and fashion. Which, inevitably, makes her invaluable to marketers everywhere on earth.

But this assignment…this one doesn’t merely involve reacting to a logo design. This one is a sprawling mystery. Where do those odd video posts to the Internet come from? Why do they inspire such fanatic loyalty? And who is it that really wants to know -- enough to break into Cayce's apartment, hack her computer, threaten her life?

Walk away? Cayce Pollard has her father’s stubbornness: a former intelligence agent, he was last seen in a taxi headed toward the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001...

This is a story we couldn’t stop reading and can’t forget. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

The Village Voice

Pattern recognition, Gibson makes clear, is not just the coolhunter's job description but a survival tactic within the context of no context -- dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning, as our accelerating now leaves us ever further behind.

Chicago Tribune

It turns out that William Gibson knows as much about the present as he does about the future....Now, in his first book set in the preset, Gibson turns loose the full power of his laser eyes and his non-judgmental but awesomely encompassing heart on an exciting thriller that is basically a modern fable, a quest for hints on how to live now....It's a masterful performance from a major novelist who seems to be just now hitting his peak. Welcome to the present, Mr. Gibson

Washington Post

..overall, Gibson has delivered what is assuredly one of the first authentic and vital novels of the 21st century, placing himself alongside Haruki Murakami as a writer who can conjure the numinous out of the quotidian.

San Francisco Chronicle

...The completely contemporary "Pattern Recognition" finds the author rejuvenated, ready to acknowledge that the world has become a stranger place than could have been imagined even 15 years ago. It's his best book in a long time, and perhaps his most accessible one ever!

The New Yorker

Almost two decades ago, Gibson's début novel, "Neuromancer," which coined the term "cyberspace," established him as the oracle of postmodern science fiction. His new book, though, is set entirely in the present -- specifically, in the aftermath of September 11th. Cayce Pollard is a brand consultant whose father disappeared on September 11th. She becomes fascinated by mysterious scraps of film footage -- seemingly random scenes, luminously shot -- that are disseminated on the Web and have spawned cults of viewers. Gibson wisely avoids addressing the import of 9/11 head on, but he somehow establishes a powerful correlative for it in Cayce's strange quest -- through the Tokyo red-light district and the Moscow underworld -- to find the anonymous filmmaker. In Gibson's eerie vision of our time, the future has come crashing upon us, fragmentary and undecipherable; as one character declares, "We have no future because our present is too volatile."

Publishers Weekly

Gibson, known as the "patron saint of cyberpunk lit," has made his reputation with futuristic tales. Though his new novel is set in the present, baroque descriptions of everyday articles and menacing anthropomorphic treatment of the Internet and sister technology give it a sci-fi feel. Cayce Pollard, a market researcher with razor-sharp intuition, makes big bucks by evaluating potential products and advertising campaigns. In London, she stays in the trendy digs of documentary filmmaker friend Damien (away on assignment), whom she e-mails frequently. When Cayce brusquely rejects the new logo of advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, she earns his respect and a big check but makes an enemy of his graphic designer, vindictive Dorotea Benedetti. Hubertus later hires Cayce to ferret out the origin of a series of sensual film clips appearing guerrilla style on computers all over the world and attracting a growing cult following. Cayce treats this as a standard job until somebody breaks into Damien's flat and hacks into her computer. Suddenly every casual encounter carries undertones of danger. Her investigative trail takes her to Tokyo and Russia and through a rogue's gallery of iconoclastic Web-heads. Casting a further shadow is the memory of her father, Win, a security expert (probably CIA) missing and presumed dead in the World Trade Center disaster of exactly a year earlier. For complicated reasons even she doesn't understand, she connects her current dilemma with her father's tragedy and follows the trail with the fervor of a personal vendetta. Gibson's brisk, kinetic style and incisive observations should keep the reader entertained even when Cayce's quest begins to lose urgency. Gibson's best book since Mona Lisa Overdrive should satisfy his hardcore fans while winning plenty of new ones. Agent, Martha Millard. 10-city author tour; rights sold in Denmark, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, Spain and the U.K. (Feb.) Forecast: Given Gibson's reputation with SF fans, his grasp of popular culture and state-of-the-art technology and his inimitable narrative voice, this chase thriller should take off right out of the gate. Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

In an apparent attempt to write one of the first post-9/11 novels, Gibson, best known for his hip cyberpunk fiction set in a dystopic near future, locates this text in contemporary time. The plot concerns Cayce Pollard, a thirtysomething freelance market researcher, who, because of her phobic reaction to certain brand names that somehow allows her to recognize what will become "cool" and thus profitable, is hired to locate the makers of some cryptic video footage anonymously posted on the Internet. This footage, which inexplicably takes on the status of a modern-day Delphic Oracle, has been an obsession of a cohort of web junkies (including Pollard herself), who prattle on about its possible origin, meaning, and significance. For characterization, Gibson relentlessly employs clothes-catalog descriptions, making this novel virtually impossible to distinguish from the trivialized pop culture it purports to critique. The novel itself may be classified as a melodrama of beset geekdom-focusing on post-9/11, angst-ridden, globe-hopping computer nerds and marketing employees who jet from London to Tokyo and elsewhere, all the while keeping in touch via e-mail and cell phone. This book, which may well reveal the emptiness at the core of Gibson's other fiction, will probably thrill his aficionados but, it is hoped, no one else. Given Gibson's immense popularity, however, it is recommended for all libraries.-Roger A. Berger, Everett Community Coll., WA Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

Adult/High School-Cayce Pollard is a well-paid professional marketer. She and her friends-filmmakers, dealers in electronic esoterica, designers, and hackers-live on the cutting edge of a highly technological, "post-geographic" world, where the manipulation of cultural trends can bring great power. When she is employed to discover the source of "the Footage," a mysterious film that has been appearing in bits and pieces on the Web and gathering a worldwide underground following, her survival is at stake. In her search for the auteur, she outwits corporate spies, terrorists, and mobsters in London, Tokyo, Moscow, and New York; struggles with ethical issues; and even delves into the mystery of her father's disappearance on September 11, 2001. Some readers might feel that this novel demands too much of them-the prose is witty, each page challenges with provocative observations, and there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. But those who enjoyed Gibson's earlier work, or the writing of Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling, should relish this headlong race through an unsettling but recognizable world to a surprisingly humane conclusion.-Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, VA Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

From The Critics

New York Times Book Review
Elegant, entrancing …. Without any metafictional grandstanding, Gibson nails the texture of internet culture: how it feels to be close to someone you know only as a voice in a chat room, or to fret about someone spying on your browser's list of sites visited. ..."Pattern Recognition" is Gibson's most complex, mature gloss on the artist's relationship to our ever more commercialized globe.

Kirkus Reviews

A return to the present makes this SF scribe more prescient than ever.

It's been a long time since Gibson wowed us with Neuromancer (1984) and the rest of the Sprawl trilogy that changed the then-moribund field of science fiction forever. Unfortunately, it's been a hard act to live up to. His latest might not satisfy his readers' high level of expectation, either, but it's doubtless his best work since Count Zero (1986). Even though it's his first novel set entirely in present time, there's a sense that he's getting back to his roots. The heroine, Cayce, is a nod to the hacker in Neuromancer who became the prototypical cyberpunk antihero. She's a cool, slinky, yet insecure piece of mystery who has a near-oracular ability to predict the Next Big Thing. After being called in to consult on whether a new logo will work, Cayce says only one word, "No," and her fee is earned. She's then hired for a bigger project by über-cool marketing firm Blue Ant to investigate the origins of a strange series of film clips-over a 130 now-that have been showing up on the Internet and attracting a wide cult of fans, including Cayce, who try to figure their origin and purpose. Soon Cayce is jetting off to Tokyo, back to London, then off to Russia, following the wispiest threads of evidence, rumor, and blind conjecture. Someone's tracking her, and a sinister fog of suspicion fills Cayce's jet-setting, wireless world. Gibson's narrative is more relaxed than it has been in years, trusting in Cayce's strangely addictive personality and in his own laser-perfect cultural radar-Malcolm Gladwell meets Marshall McLuhan in a chat room-to carry the story along. Some elements could have easily been jettisoned (Cayce'sliteral allergy to brands and logos is ridiculous), but for every misstep there's a dash of pure, beautiful insight: "We have no future because our present is too volatile . . . We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition."

A slick but surprisingly humane piece of work from the father of cyberpunk.