Rating: 
Summary: A Good One
Review: Most readers of this one will be attracted, like I was, because it's a William Gibson novel. When your resume includes Neuromancer and you coined the term "cyberspace" your new book tends to attract a lot of attention. Don't be disappointed....this is a good novel.....it's just not going to set the world on fire. With a title like pattern recognition, I was expecting a lot....what you get is a story of a coolhunter (which is a great concept based on pattern recognition used for marketing prediction) combined with an Internet video (somewhat like "The Ring"'s script) and a personal detective story (which builds on the 911 disasters - sorry, but that's a cheap shot to me).The paranoia of most of Gibson's writing does come through (I refuse to ruin the book for you by giving details in a review). This is a good story by a great writer. If Gibson is going to build a body of work that is substantial, we can't expect each piece to be an instant classic. Personally, I'd rather have a good or great series of works from him over the next couple of decades instead of having to settle for 2 or 3 classics. Just my opinion.....if you agree, get this one.....you'll be pleased....which is OK for now.
Rating: 
Summary: Cheap plot devices, easy stereotypes, and dated tech
Review: Neuromancer is a true classic. Although written 20 years ago, it still seems visionary today. Unfortunately, Pattern Recognition won't be remembered as either a classic or visionary. 2 years old as I write this, it already shows signs of age. Gibson seems to be trying to be cutting edge current, with the main characters "googling" each other, a discussion of steganography (very 90s), and other current tech references. But what they show is that Gibson is out of his element in using real world current tech instead of envisioning the future. His reliance on media-propagated internet (and cultural) stereotypes begs the question of whether the future he foresaw in Neuromancer has already left him far behind in reality.
The female protagonist has a mental aversion to brands and can't safely go into department stores, wear clothes that are overbranded, etc, without risking physical manifestations of her malady. Yet while she suffers from even seeing the Michelin Man in print form, she is comfortable carry around an iBook, complete with its iBook and Apple logos one supposes, with no problems. Is Gibson trying to impress his literary and artistic circle of pals who "know" that Macs and iAnything are the only cool tech products the in circle can own? Or, judging by the insane number of times her laptop is referred to by its brand name as "iBook" maybe this is the first occurrence of movie-style corporate brand placement in a book? Or maybe that's Gibson's little ironic joke on all of us: that his brand-averse heroine is helping him promote iBooks.
Beyond that annoying fact, I was deeply disturbed by the secondary plot line involving the female lead's deceased father and 9/11. There may come a day when passing references to 9/11 are appropriate in literature and film. But here, it's too recent and fresh. It's inappropriate and comes off as a cheap plot device.
I'm sure this book has some redeeming literary value that I missed, that Gibson has some artistry with his voice that rises above a weak plot that won't stand the test of time. But that wasn't what I was reading it for.
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.
gbruno.tblog.com
Rating:
Summary: Great Book -------------------------------> Here's why:
Review: Pattern Recognition is set in our own time, where consumers rule the economy, and marketing rules consumers. Cayce Pollard is a young woman with a very special trait - she's intensely brand-sensitive, suffering allergic reactions in the presence of advertising. Cayce herself is only able to wear the plainest grayscale clothing, with all labels and identifying marks cut or sanded off. But in a world where more money is spent on advertising than on developing the products themselves, Cayce's sensitivity is highly lucrative. Labeled a "coolhunter" by an industry wag, Cayce works as an advertising consultant to mega-firms: they place a logo before her, she gives the gladiatorial thumbs-up or thumbs-down. And that's it. Cayce's decision is never questioned; her specialty is too well known in the business for that. It's not that Cayce personally likes or dislikes what she sees - she's just a human litmus test for the elusive notion of "cool."
In her spare time, Cayce works toward solving the mystery of an underground art-film movement. Brief fragments of footage are regularly released online, "hidden" in old archives or ghost sites where techie followers swiftly discover them. The fragments always feature the same man and woman, and are seemingly free of any identifying characteristics that could pin the footage down to a specific time or place. So far, the footage does not follow a linear narrative, and does not appear to have been released in chronological order; "footageheads" violently debate online the origins and maker(s) of the mysterious clips. Cayce finds the footage fascinating; like her, the film is timeless and brandless, a rarity in a world permeated by advertising. Posting regularly to a site called Footage : Fetish : Forum, Cayce discusses the material endlessly with her similarly obsessed peers, though nobody's come up with any evidence yet.
Visiting London on a consulting job for Blue Ant, a sleek and expensive advertising agency, Cayce receives a highly unusual proposition from Blue Ant's owner, the unspeakably wealthy and completely untrustworthy Hubertus Bigend. Turns out Bigend is a footagehead, too, with one big difference: he's a footagehead with enough cash to finance a money-no-object hunt for the filmmaker(s). He wants to team Cayce up with Boone Chu, a Chinese-American hacker, and sic them on the anonymous makers. Deeply suspicious of Bigend, but even more deeply desirous of solving the mystery, Cayce reluctantly agrees to the partnership, and they're off on a globetrotting quest to find what may indeed be the best-kept secret in the world: the name of the maker.
Cayce is astonishingly convincing as a twentysomething Gen-Xer, a representative specimen of loneliness and blurred identity battered by relentless commercial hype. Like many of us (okay, okay...like many of us geeks), Cayce's most genuine personal connections are made through cyberspace; her parents are both lost to her in different ways (her father missing in the 9/11 disaster, her mother taking refuge in a hippie commune monitoring spirit voices from the ether), her closest friend lives on another continent, and her most esteemed colleague is a footagehead whose real name she doesn't even know. Sound familiar? It should.
Gibson spits out whippy, barbed prose with an edgy, slangy feel, and dialogue so deft and natural that you hardly notice it's there. Couching his narrative in a world-weary, cynically comic tone, Gibson dishes out some funny moments, as when Cayce ponders Tommy Hilfiger: "There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul." Gibson repeatedly rips Starbucks a new one throughout the narrative as well, and though these complaints against omnipresent mega-corporations are hardly new, they're well suited to the setting and the tale. Equal parts social commentary and action-packed sci-fi, Pattern Recognition gives the lie to the notion that cyberpunk is dead; if anything, it's closer to becoming part of our reality than ever (much to my inner sci-fi geek's delight). Buy this book! Also recommended is the Amazon-quick pick, [...] by Tom Grimes -- a devastingly funny, ingenious novel related to the themes in Pattern Recognition.
Rating:
Summary: Gibson has crafted a compelling story with razor-sharp prose
Review: PATTERN RECOGNITION spins a complicated spy story filled with double crosses, dramatic rescues, power-hungry marketers, iconoclastic hackers, documentary filmmakers, industrial spies, Russian mobsters, Internet lurkers and quirky computer geeks. However, it also functions as a sharp commentary on consumerism and the calculated dissemination of pop culture. If Gibson's signature has long been his ability to incorporate cultural touchstones into futuristic works to imbue them with a sense of immediacy and relevance, then his latest work --- set only one year after September 11th and saturated with familiar brand names like Google and Pilates --- acknowledges and parodies our willingness to be manipulated by advertising. The story centers on Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter" with an uncanny knack for understanding logos and identifying trends before the public at large recognizes them. In an ironic twist typical of Gibson's sardonic humor, she herself is acutely allergic to brand names, harboring a violent reaction to the doughy Michelin Man, among other random trademarks. The story is framed by the events of September 11th and their personal relevance to Cayce: Her father, Win Pollard, rode in a cab that morning and headed in the direction of the World Trade Center only to disappear without a trace. The mystery surrounding his disappearance maintains a tenuous connection with the plot until the novel's end, when her father's past and Cayce's present converge in unlikely but poignant circumstances. Cayce is also part of an online community that strives to find meaning and patterns in a series of video clips anonymously uploaded to the web. Her personal interest and work collide when a marketing consultant --- who recognizes the genius in how the clips (simply referred to as the "footage") has garnered a global audience with fervent brand loyalty --- hires her to track down who's behind it. But when someone hacks into her personal computer and starts following her, Cayce realizes this isn't a typical freelance gig. The investigations have Cayce jet setting between London, Moscow and Tokyo. Gibson manages to make the contemporary setting at once realistic and fantastical, imbuing the novel with a surreal quality reminiscent of Neal Stephenson, Hitchcock and even Blade Runner. The plot itself --- with a series of impossible coincidences, chance meetings and pure luck --- doesn't stand a chance under careful examination, but somehow the disparate elements dovetail so perfectly at the end that it doesn't matter. Gibson manages to make the impossible plausible and delightfully satisfying. His first novel set in the present-day seems bent on acknowledging that today's world is as contradictory and oddball as any futuristic, sci-fi alter-universe. Besides crafting a compelling story, Gibson's razor-sharp prose is as precise as ever, even when describing something as commonplace as jet lag: "[Cayce's] mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical cord down the vanished wake of the plane." Gibson's newest work is evocative of the current zeitgeist: unrelentingly realistic and cautiously optimistic. --- Reviewed by Jen Robbins
Rating: 
Summary: What's With All The SPOILERS?
Review: This book is okay. It's incredibly over-detailed -- cut out the endless indulgent minutiae of the settings, and the endless litany of brand-names and etc., enough to make Cayce herself puke -- cut out all that, and you've got a quirky little short story that might not be too bad. Still, you get into a Gibson looking for this kind of thing, and I know that, and I can enjoy it.
I've never seen SO MANY SPOILERS in the reviews before! I only just picked up this book the other day, and I thought I'd see what you all thought of it, and have found numerous spoilers in posts without the word SPOILER ALERT in the title! THANKS A LOT YOU GUYS! Now, I've written Amazon about this, but I doubt they'll do anything -- frankly, I'm surprised there's no apparatus in place to report people who flagrantly hurl spoilers out there to ruin others' reading experience. There's no apparatus in place to turn in Spoilermakers and hold them accountable. Too bad.
You know who you are! Thanks so much for ruining the surprises in the book for me!
Rating:
Summary: Astute insights into global and digital culture
Review: This is the first Gibson book I've read although I have always been interested in his other works. An search for marketing books one day on Amazon lead to the pre-hardcover release information of this book: I since followed the book's release and dispersal into the public realm with interest, and bought it to read on a vacation. I finished the book quickly, as once it gets going (a few chapters in), the book is hard to put down. The character development is excellent, and plot exciting and adventurous like a good spy novel, and the descriptions of foreign places (Tokyo, London, Russia) full of detail and nuance. However, for me, the strongest part of the book was its spot-on assessment of what modern people have become, and the culture in which we live: a global, digitally-enhanced and -supported lifestyle that becomes more and more pervasive as technology becomes cheaper and continues its encroachment upon nearly all parts of the world. Gibson has obviously spent time in chat rooms and message boards; has tasted what it is to follow an obsession (so easy to do with the internet, be it person or thing); has experienced the "soul delay" of business travel (three countries in three days); and learned the art of Goggling and other internet-based research techniques, for all these ideas give major structure to the novel. Internet junkies, fashionistas, armchair travellers, and collectors of obscure objects will all be able to relate to this story. As disparate as those elements may sound, Gibson has neatly wrapped them up into one quirky person, the protagonist Cayce Pollard, who embodies most of Gibson's ideas and cultural observations. Gibson also uses several terms throughout the book, which you will either catch the first time they are explained, or seek out their meaning once you realize their place in the narrative. These terms seem to derive from marketing or internet lingo, which serve as idiomatic themes for the way the characters communicate (both in person and "virtually"). My only complaint about this book is that the ending is a bit of a let down. After such a masterfully paced biuld up, the ending didn't have as much impact as the rest of the book: the wrap-up seemed hasty, the characters not as well developed as the ones who were introduced earlier, and some of it seemed just a bit implausible. It almost seemed like Gibson had too good a time writing this book to find an adequate way to end it. But the book is still unquestionably excellent and modern, and a somewhat lazy ending doesn't detract from Gibson's wonderful prose style or his astute comments on human civilization in the 21st Century.
|
