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.
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.