Pattern Recognition

Rating:
Summary: Gibson, high priest of -- hope for the future?
Review: I am surprised by the lack of comments on the reverberating shock from September 11 that runs through this book. Grief, sadness, pain -- are these words too embarrassing for sci fi fans to use? Can we force ourselves to write "hope?" For such is the unexpected late guest at the dark feast that began with Neuromancer. Gibson, creator of worlds where our traumatized children long to become information flow while their bodies rot, seems to have looked up and caught a glimpse of the sun. We can wonder that September 11 has made his landscape far less bleak.

Cayce Pollard is Gibson's most fragile and human creation. Her friends care for her. She emails her mom. (Did the word "mom" even appear in any of his other books?) She is numb with loneliness and grief for her father (missing on Sept. 11). While logos and brand names and Product seem to describe the limits of her world, her hunt for the footage takes her instead into the heart of a very human story, where the motive for bleeding edge technology turns out to be fierce protectiveness for the wounded and -- go on, you can say it -- love.

I found this book surprisingly comforting. Gibson, the high priest of cyber-alienation, holds out hope that our technology can connect us. We are not cyborgs yet. Pain hurts. And remaining human is not a bad thing.

Rating:
Summary: Delayed Impact
Review: My wife and I have been reading Gibson aloud to each other for years now. His prose is so, well, poetic, it really tolerates vocalization quite nicely. After "All Tomorrow's Parties" (the most beautifully written SF novel and one of the most interesting I have read recently), we were quite excited by the advent of "Pattern Recognition" and sprang for the hardcover.

We read it aloud on a long drive together, an hour or so at a time. The "mystery" of the plot and the oblique excitement to know what happens next that it engenders kept us looking forward to each reading session. At the end, however, we finished the novel with a vague feeling of disappointment, of loose-ends being tied up too neatly, of the resolution being essentially too banal for the detail and complexity that lead up to it. Perhaps that was Mr. Gibson's point. Dunno.

However, I must say, that in the months since, points of view about current world culture that are expressed (both implicitly and explicitly) in the novel have kept returning to our casual conversation. I conclude that much of the book is profound in some subtle sense that may not effect you right away, but which will have a long lasting influence on each reader's consciousness of popular trends and their expression in media and merchandise.

A warning: as with most of William Gibson's books, there are layers here. If you are a pop and internet culture enthusiast (not to mention technologically "aware"), that is, if you are "hip" you'll "get" almost all of the book. If not, well, you may not "catch" enough of the (many) cultural references or enough of the interplay between ideas, character, and plot to make it worth your read.

Rating:
Summary: irresistable gnomic trivia
Review: Odd how Gibson fiction is not much good, at the same time, seems better than any other fiction around.
Most fiction is about:
1) Girl does adultery to gain status: Wuthering heights, War & peace, Mme Bovary, (or Tales of Genji, to go back 1000 years)
2) Boy grows up and leaves town : Dubliners, Sons & lovers
3) Hornblower hoists sail, or the SciFi clones of, with space ships and Emperors

Gibson writes flat, detail obsessed studies of people in culture. In the area I am expert in (Cryptography) he actually gets details slightly wrong, so I guess he may be slightly wrong about Vodun, or designer luggage or other areas he details. Somehow it doesnt matter, his air of fascinated resignation, melancholy abstraction, loving attentive indifference, is weirdly compelling (I actually pay money for his work)
He famously defined "cyberspace" on a manual typewriter, so I suppose he wrote this work about branding wearing Kmart boat shoes.
I read it wearing a 1986 pulsar digital watch, the one with the black metal band, with a new faceplate, so no logo.
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