Pattern Recognition

Rating:
Summary: Beyond Recognition
Review: Can anyone recognize this pattern? Zzzzzzzzzzz. That's the sound of someone who's just finished reading Willaim Gibson's new novel "Pattern Recognition". Try to imagine a contemporary thriller involving marketing & advertiseing, collectable calculators, September 11th, international intrigue and a cult of internet geeks obsessed with a series of web-based film clips that may or may not be part of a longer work. Now imagine characters as stiff as statues, endless descriptions of clothing, shoes & luggage, dialogue as dull as ditchwater, pages of characters opening e-mail, reading e-mail, closing e-mail, opening e-mail, sending e-mail, closing e-mail, etc, etc. All of this is presented in prose as compelling as a shopping list written by the Raymond Chandler of the information age and almost guaranteed to induce The Big Sleep.

Rating:
Summary: Awful
Review: With all those 4 and 5 star reviews this is probably in the minority; but I have 1 question - what the heck is this book about?

No plot. Nothing to identify with. Confused situations.

I guess I am "uncool".

And if I hear/read the words "mirror world" again I will throw up.

Can I get my money back?

Rating:
Summary: Sorta cold
Review: I admire this book probably more than I enjoyed it. Gibson
pulls off everything he seems to be aiming for. Does a nice job keeping the cyperpunk feel without once stepping outside of modern possibilities. Has all the fashionable stuff, studiously
avoids brand names as much as possible. But it's Russian mafia
and hi-tek minimalist characters and honest his Camden Town isn't that well observed, though it fits into his image thing, and Paris and Tokyo hardly exist, like all he's done is attend a convention or a conference and never gone past the hotel districts of any of these places. Which is okay, I guess, since his characters don't really, either. And there's a nice
bit of resonance with the twins (no give away plot here) and a
sense of mortality, of creativity coming off 'the footage' as
the mysterious movie clips are called, so it makes a neat modern thriller, like a movie with no heart. And maybe that's it. Too cold for me. But you gotta admire the dude. He doesn't rest on his old laurels and he really is trying for something new and he is expanding his range, kind of. So four stars for intelligence and good writing, but can't give it a five 'cause the heart don't beat hard or fast enough.

Rating:
Summary: His best since Neuromancer
Review: This is Gibson's best book since Neuromancer. Good characters, great story. Definitely worth reading.

Rating:
Summary: Lesser writers have failed to mature as nicely.
Review: After I read Neuromancer the first time (yes, I read it more than once), I joked that Gibson wrote it once and then removed about half the words. In Pattern Recognition, he recaptures that hard-edged, terse, yet gorily descriptive prose. It is, as Neil Gaiman says on the back cover, Gibson's best book since his great moment in science fiction history (I still think Neuromancer is the best science fiction book I've ever read). The interesting thing here is that PR is not science fiction, and I believe that is because, unsurprisingly, Gibson, despite the sparkling sentences, is not the same man he was twenty years ago. He has matured and his view of the world, while certainly still dark and paranoid, has changed.

Some will probably say that PR is science fiction. Without doubt, there is much in the book that smacks of the genre, especially the sub-genre Gibson is famous for creating. Technology and it's accouterment are ubiquitous: cell-phones, laptops, software, the internet, chatrooms, servers--all the usual suspects of a Gibson environment. Lights either hurt the eyes or barely exist. Surfaces are hard and shiny, clothing dark, edges lethal, and people all of the above. The lines between corporate executives, crime bosses, and government leaders are blurry, at best. And, as in all Gibson's work, the super-rich are above it all, somehow both less and more human than ordinary people.

However, this book is set squarely in the barely-past-September 11 present. Further, the technology all exists already. There is no prediction and no more speculation than any novel that invents institutions and locales. The hard affect and cynical view of our geo-political-social world are only science fiction out of habit; in fact, this is just Gibson describing part of the world that he sees around him.

Even more to the point is that Gibson reverses science fiction's priorities. No matter what the writers of science fiction say, the genre is first and foremost about science, about thinking of cool possibilities in the near (or not so near) future. People are basically methods of talking about the ideas. Yeah, the best science fiction uses the cover of the science to also talk about important ideas or trends in contemporary life, but if the science isn't there, most of even the best books in the genre fall flat on their computer screens (alas, this is probably true of even Neuromancer).

PR puts people first. The main character (Cayce Pollard, in a nod to Neuromancer's Case) is free-lance marketing consultant with a phobia for trademarks and logos, haunted by the mystery of her father's disappearance in New York on September 11. Her "tame pathologies"--a variation of another standard device for Gibson--make her a legend in the marketing world. Partly because she's dealing with the probable loss of her father, she's become obsessed with a series of small video clips disseminated anonymously over the web. The segments are beautiful and enigmatic in a way that attracts a cult following which meets virtually at "Fetish:Footage:Forum". Cayce's emotional pain, psychological distress, and passion for the unknown footage take her on a wild ride around the world looking for "the maker"--the creator or creators of these clips. We watch as she struggles to put the clues and, more importantly, her psyche back together. There is plenty of action, but ultimately this is a novel of interiority.

And Cayce's interiority is not the only important one here. There are real side characters with developed personalities and relationships built on talking and intimacy. Parkaboy, one of the "F:F:F" regulars, goes on impassioned tirades against other posters and Cayce spends hours responding to him both on the forum and through private email. Cayce and her friend Damien, a documentary film maker, have a long relationship full of communication about their fears and aspirations. All of them care deeply about what they are doing and work very hard at it. In fact, caring about what you do enough to put yourself on the line is what separates the good guys from the bad in the PR. Artists, waitresses, computer geeks, corporate execs, and even Russian mafia bosses are okay as long as they are doing something they believe in. Bad guys are those for whom "it's all actually about money."

Fortunately, the moral scale is not quite as stark as this. The "good guys" are still complicated and there's usually some good things about the "bad guys," too. There's plenty of sexual attraction and more than a share of glitzy, pretty people and things. But, there are also some grim realities and fully engaged people doing things they care about. This story affirms human relationships and the importance of doing that which you care about passionately. It is also a criticism of the importance of money in our culture, of what Charles Taylor calls our society's focus on "instrumental reason." The overt moralism and the centrality of human relationships are things I think Gibson is trying on as an author for the first time; his tentativeness is borne out by the fact that this is his simplest book, structurally, since Neuromancer. While I don't think he's duplicated the original genius of that book, Pattern Recognition is still a good book, and that despite our ability to see his lack of certainty. After twenty years, a marriage, children, probably a mortgage --the whole Catastrophe--Gibson has tired of creating only young, hard-edged, self-destructive characters and stories. He has discovered that all of life is not hard drugs, fast women, and faster guns. He's trying to write himself a new definition. Many writers in this situation have failed to mature as well.

Rating:
Summary: Easy read and a lot of fun...
Review: Taking place in the present in Camden Town, Tokyo and Moscow, the settings are different to most of the other William Gibson books. Also, if you ignore the fact the characters run around with a laptop, mobile phone and using hotmail, there is no real cyberpunk activity either. That said, his characters are as radical and unconventional as ever.

Cayce Pollard is a character I'd like to see in a future novel -- working as a coolhunter with an attitude and an allergy to trademarks, she takes some time off to hunt the publisher of a series of movie shorts that have been mysteriously appearing on the internet. I raced through this book, and ended up wishing there was more.

As an aside, so far, I haven't located a F:F:F newsgroup, but Gibson's daily blog does add some insight into some of his ideas in the book and might just help keep me going until Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver is published.....

Rating:
Summary: The writing, itself, is exhilarating . . .
Review: First, the good. Gibson is one of the most talented writers in the SF/Fantasy field, and other writers wisely mine his books for ideas capable of sustaining an entire novel that he tosses aside on the slag heap of wild invention. The pacing and suspense are well-maintained throughout, and this is one of Gibson's more readable efforts. It might be a challenging lit class assignment to compare and contrast this with The Space Merchants, another SF novel about the world of advertising that has been popular for 50 years. On the down side, I must say I didn't find any characters I could relate to as real people. They seemed more like caricatures of movie jet-setters, entirely superficial, with no emotion, motivation or substance at all. I'm thinking, perhaps, Gibson was trying to say something here about the coldness and shallowness of our technological society, but I'm not sure what it might have been. For me, this comes off as a well-written period piece, sort of an extended magazine article, with not quite enough plot to be a novel, and technology that will very likely date itself within the next 5-10 years.

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: Completely satisfied
Review: I found this book to be a smoother read than his earlier works. Still sharp and very Gibson, but more heart/depth/soul. He skillfully deals with some intense subjects with a gentlemanly grace and respect. I didn't hit any slow spots, and had a hard time putting it down. Nice finish as usual. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

Rating:
Summary: first I've gotten though
Review: I have tried to read Gibson's books before, but have quickly lost interest. In my own mind, I attribute this to the remoteness of his characters and my difficulty in figuring out what's going on.

I purchased "pattern Recognition" based on the flap description, and found it very absorbing. Like other reviewers, I enjoy Gibson's ability to capture the feel of things with a few perfect words, and relate to concepts like london as a "mirror'world" where everything is just slightly off kilter from the U.S.

That said, I thought the end was a letdown. When I asked myself "what is this book about" I did not have an answer. Probably there is a giant metaphor at work that I am just missing, but for me, it didn't all connect up and make sense. unless that was the point, which always feels like a cop-out to me.

In sum, enjoy the journey, don't expect too much of the destination.