Rating: 
Summary: not the William Gibson i found in 1988
Review: After the last fiasco (all tomorrows parties) i figured Gibson was due for a come back. didn't happen. at least he drops all pretense of sci-fi. none here. has a few high points but in the end never really gets worked out very well. you would think he would know about the dangers of trying to cross over like Phillip K. tried to do...
some decent lines in the book and not terrible as a modern day tale, but not the Gibson of legend...
try Bruce Sterlings "Holy Fire" if you need a fix.
Rating: 
Summary: Haven't read a best-seller or a sci-fi book in awhile: great
Review: Usually I have trouble starting a book just before I go to sleep but this one grabbed me. I haven't been this excited by a writer I hadn't read before in a looong time. I have gone on to read through his back list of older titles. He's a good writer, engaging through the usual narrative hooks of plot and character interest as well as using new and "cool" terms that are not just futuristic hi-jinks. He usually explains these soon enough that you are stimulated but not left feeling confused or stupid. Like I said in my lead-off, I haven't read any best-sellers or sci-fi in awhile but this was truly a great read. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: It's how it feels...
Review: This is the first book I have read by the legendary William Gibson, and I must say I'm quite taken. It's not the story so much as the way he tells it. He is very culturally--techno-culturally--sensitive, and he sure knows how to craft a sentence.For one thing, he seems to have mastered the usually irritating practice of verbing nouns. From the common "to Google," to the Tokyo urban scene that looks like it's been "Blade Runnered." I'm ashamed to admit I ended up with a list of almost 30 words I didn't know (and mind you, I play a mean game of Scrabble), yet his is a very subtle command of the language. From what I've heard, this book is a departure for Gibson, whose novels normally take place in the not-too-distant future. This one takes place in the present, but a very tech-savvy present. The events of September 11 figure largely in the book, but in more of a supporting role--just like they've figured in most of our lives. The story really has a feel of happening right now. Gibson seems to want to keep this book current for a while: he describes someone as looking like "a prop from one sequel or another of The Matrix." But of course, even the first sequel won't be out until later this year. The story is about Cayce Pollard, a psychologically complicated marketing consultant who has an allergy to brands and corporate logos-- literally. But this is just subtext. An ad firm magnate hires her to find the maker of anonymous film segments that have been popping up on the Web and which have drawn a big cult following. He ambiguously wants to commoditize it. She partners up with all sorts of nonchalantly bleeding-edge technophiles and hunts down the secret. But like I said, it's not so much about the story--although it has good, but typical, thriller twists and surprises--this book is about how the story is told. Lot's of the action takes place over e-mail or on a message board. Digital watermarking, rendering, viral marketing, Japanese fashion, and iBooks connected to cell phones, and, of course, the characters empowered by these technologies are what make this book. I can imagine how it might be horribly annoying to others, but I loved that the main character was constantly exhausted. This was owed in large part to her traveling between London, Tokyo, and Moscow in a very short period (humans aren't made for such a small world), but it seems like she would have been tired regardless. I relate to that. In the EEA we worked for a small fraction of the day, and spent the rest of our time relaxing--a lot like chimps. Today we--or at least I am--are plugged into the network almost 24 hours a day. My brain doesn't get a moment's rest. But don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. And wasn't this supposed to be a review of Pattern Recognition? Well, it's fun. Go read it. Myself, I'm going to get me a copy of Neuromancer.
Rating:
Summary: Continued good stuff from Gibson
Review: I have enjoyed William Gibson's books over the years, and this one is no exception. Those that are looking for hard sci-fi or futuristic cyberpunk will not find it here. This book takes place in the present day with today's technology. Gibson is good about showcasing ideas and items that live below the radar of most people. For example, Gibson talks about mechanical calculators called Curtas. I won't go into the plot structure, you can read it on other Amazon reviews. In the novel, Gibson explores the idea that everyone is searching for something. Be it an answer, love, or a mechanical calculator, each individual is looking for something special in life. Something that has importance to them, but not to others. The book looks at how these individuals quests intertwine and work together. Gibson also shows how the new technologies available make the completion of such quest easier. Technology does not change what people desire in life, it just changes how they go about reaching their goals. If you are looking for a traditional 'hero-wins-in-the-last-chapter-after-cheating-certain-death' sci-fi novel, this ain't for you. If you are interested in thinking about how technology adds or subtracts to the work of attaining happiness, this book is for you.
Rating:
Summary: He took a duck in the face at 250 knots . . .
Review: In my opinion, Bill Gibson has never written a bad book -- but even so, this is his best work in a long time. He sets his story in the present this time instead of the near future, but the feel of it is much the same. Which, I suppose is part of the point he wants to make; the future is now. Cayce Pollard is a thirty-something freelance marketing consultant with an unusual specialty: By applying her "allergy" to trademarks, she can predict very accurately whether corporate logos and branding will be successful in the marketplace. (Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man are especially toxic.) She's also a "footagehead," one of an international group of avid afficionados who study and endlessly analyze a series of short and highly affecting video clips discovered on the Internet. The two come together when the head of an important London ad agency (with his own agenda, naturally) hires her to uncover the creators of the footage. The third major thread in her life is contemplating the disappearance of her father, a retired CIA-connected security specialist in New York on the morning of September 11th. All these themes and plots weave themselves together in intriguing ways, and in Gibson's classic narrative style. But, aside from the story itself, much of the enjoyment one gets from Gibson's books is a result of his skill at description and simile, all of it highly quotable.
Rating: 
Summary: the future is now
Review: If you're a fan of William Gibson's earlier novels, you probably already realize that he has never been a classic gee-whiz fabulous future kind of science fiction writer. He has always used the future as an incidental backdrop for a noir crime story. Forget the antiseptic utopian corridors of a starship, the reader can feel the humid, crowded ,unfriendly streets of his world, because it is the same world we already live in. In "Pattern Recognition", Gibson jettisons the pretense of setting his story in the future and opts for the here and now. 9/11 has just happened and hangs over Cayce Pollard, the story's protagonist, and the world she moves through more powerfully than any imagined future could. She sums up her creator's choice of setting when she paraprhases Eisenhower's comment, "The future has never been more like the present than it is now." If you're looking for a bright shiny Sci-Fi kind of story look elsewhere, this book is more of a contemporary Dashiell Hammet type of story.
Rating:
Summary: Wow
Review: I'd never read Gibson before. Don't like cyber-punk (which is usually pretty juvenile) but the title appealed. Wow. Witty, well managed suspense, interesting observations, and a rollicking good yarn. Is he always this good?
Rating:
Summary: So this was about...?
Review: Style: neat. Characters: There were characters? Plot: From a conference room in London to a post-Soviet prison, with some schlock about web footage and 9.11 to make the story hip. Synopsis: One-dimensional characters participate in an apparently useless quest for some mostly useless information. The storyline makes little sense, and the ending is completely unsatisfying. Not worth your time.
Rating:
Summary: Cyber...what, exactly?
Review: So our futuristic anti-hero, Case, has been retrofitted into Cayce. Big deal, Bill! A character allergic to advertising. Aren't we all! I like the idea of Gibson trying to write about our time; after all, he practically invented our present. Unfortunately, our present is only interesting to future historians. Give us what we really want: a history of the day after tomorrow!
Still luv ya, Bill! Better luck next time!
Rating:
Summary: A liminal world
Review: One of William Gibson's strengths as a writer has been his ability to flesh out people who live between things in a liminal space, a liminal world. In his early works, his characters inhabit a space that's between criminal and respectable, where they're chronically lacking grounding. Unfortunately, a lot of readers gloss over that in favor of the technology. In "Pattern Recognition," Gibson returns to this central theme. Cayce Pollard is the consummate outsider. The degree to which this is deliberate is unclear. Cayce's logophobia -- itself a telling characteristic in a society where words and (more importantly) trademarks are ubiquitous -- is symptomatic of a deeper unwillingness to engage on more than a perfunctory level. The anomie and paranoia she experiences throughout the book are overcome only in online fora where her responses can be mediated by distance and the perceived unambiguousness of the written word. Indeed, her best friend ("Parkaboy") is someone she knows solely through his online writing; she has no assurance that he is who he says he is and not a construct. Interestingly, during the course of the book, she conspires with her online friend (and others) to create a construct-personality designed specifically to manipulate another person. Clearly, in Gibson's Cayce-world, identity is suspect -- a theme which runs throughout the book, as identity folds over itself in unexpected ways and the links between characters and events become less and less tenuous, leading the reader into Cayce's vaguely paranoid and conspiracy-laden perspective. During the course of her search for the creator(s) of the footage (film clips showing up at irregular intervals on the Internet), she encounters a variety of liminal characters -- people at the margin of commerce, engaged in the hunt for The Perfect Object. Cayce is no stranger to this; her flying jacket is one such object, and it is talismanic. Others search through well-preserved war objects seeking exactly what they don't know. The pursuit of the object (e.g., the quest) is of greater importance than actually attaining the object... Ultimately, this is what drives the footage-search. Whether or not she finds it is immaterial. Her own reasons for searching are different from those of her employer, and ultimately neither is searching for the footage itself but what it represents -- for her, closure, and for her employer, an understanding of self-propagating memes. Ultimately, the search is decentered. The book is a grand read, written with Gibson's typical minute attention to detail. Few words are out of place, and he deftly captures the senses of place where Cayce stays in few words. It's worth the time to read simply for the opportunity to look at the world through a somewhat more acute perspective than most of us adopt day to day.
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