Rating: 
Summary: Outcools Itself
Review: Pattern Recognition started off really strong and then, somewhere along the way failed to continue to build on the steam, the power, of the first part of the novel. The novel centers around Cayce Pollard, a "coolhunter" who travels to London to advise a company on their new logo. While there, she is convinced to delve deeper into her "hobby" of sorts, a mysterious, online posting of short film clips of unknown origin. She is convinced to seek out the source of the clips and along the way is attacked, followed, harrassed and faces various other perils. The resolution of the novel is a bit of a "so what?" The motivation of many of the characters doesn't really add up. The novel is cool and hip and all that, but it's missing a soul, something to make us care about it.
Rating: 
Summary: Not quite enough
Review: Not having read any other of William Gibson's books I've no benchmark to compare it to. With that said, Mr. Gibson's writing style is a pleasure - his sentences have a staccato poetic rhythm that keep the story moving at a nice clip.What bothered me about this book was that the villains weren't sinister enough and the pay back for their misdeeds lacking the proper retribution. People's motives didn't seem fully developed or explored and the ending was a bit too tidy. All in all, a good read.
Rating: 
Summary: Prada, pointless and pretentious.
Review: And this guy is considered a good writer? Hard to believe. All this *junk* about fashion, labels, brands and logos. Is this supposed to be deep? Story is weak, slow and uninteresting. The gist of it is about finding the director of a webfilm. As if real people would really care. He got two things right: 1. Hitler was great about branding; and
2. The dot.com people were all about the money. And I learned about Curtas. So what. And that smary picture on the back cover with the Converse All-Stars and nylon black coat. The thing is the anti-designer/logo fashion thing is it's own statement and label. Complete waste of money and paper.
Rating: 
Summary: No pattern recognition needed to see this book's potential
Review: When I first started reading this book, I was turned off by Gibson's style of writing. It was not traditional in any sense and I had a hard time getting past the first few pages. Once I did though, I dived into the book and I loved it. The thing I most enjoyed was the way I could relate my life to the book. For instance, one character "Googles" another. Before I go to an interview, I usually Google the person and try to find out any inside information that could help me out. It is little things like that which really make the book so captivating. Although towards the end, I thought the book was going to lose all it's excitement, I was sufficiently pleased with the twist(s) Gibson threw in. This book made me think and it made me want to go and rip the tags off all of my clothing (not really, but read the book and you'll find out just what I mean). From interesting acronyms (CPU = Cayce Pollard Unit) to marketing techniques (the idea of people being paid to "spread the word" is a great idea, not to mention very thought provoking), this book is chalk full of stuff for anyone who knows anything about the internet or loves books with a technological or scientific edge. This may have been my first Gibson, but it will surely not be my last. Two thumbs up, five starts, 10 out of 10, go buy it right now. I'm serious, right now...
Rating:
Summary: Pattern Recognition
Review: Pattern Recognition is a book far more mainstream than Neuromancer, and is more accessible for the reader of today. Although lacking in storyline and comprehensible plot, the book itself is a work of art. The commentary that Gibson provides on popular culture is priceless, and the stylistic nuances of Gibson's writing are not to be missed. Where else can you find such a sentence as:
"It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now."
Pattern Recognition is truly an excellent book; pick it up, and you'll be immersed in Cayce's world. The book opens your eyes to the level of saturation with advertisements that we experience every day, and provides a new, uncannily right-on view at the psychology of trends.
Rating:
Summary: excellent read -- average thriller
Review: There are much better thrillers and mystery novels out there. This is not even a big sci-fi book. However, few authors can make you *feel* places and things the way gibson does, and fewer still have such an instinctive and thorough understanding of culture globalization, what it brings and what it destroys.
[some possible spoilers]
As an author describing a world, Gibson is at his usual smashing self. You feel the fabric, whether it is nylon or society. You feel it stretch and rip and smell. I was not crazy about the repeating "soul-delay" part, but otherwise found the protagonist rather interesting, well-imagined and described. I did find it interesting that her appearance never quite gets described. One gets an impression of an immaculate model-like woman, but all we get to know for sure is that she exercises regularly. I like the fact that her projected persona gets to be the important one, not what she actually looks like. However, the thriller part of the book did not really work for me. In the end, it gets resolved a bit too easily, and uninterestingly. By the middle of the book it is already clear that the chain of characters cannot be too long, find one address and you are there. The ending seems to be there just for closure, everything really interesting is done, IMO, well before the end. I get a feeling that Gibson set out to write a novel about today in the form he is most familiar with, not a thriller set in today's world. Some of the characters seem extraneous and overly well-defined for the limited role they play in the thriller. Mercifully, the very very end is at least ambiguous enough to let your mind wander. Gibson is unlikely to go for a sequel with Casey as a repeating character, but at least it is not a wholly happy ending -- some menace remains.
Rating:
Summary: It may not be "Neuromancer" but...
Review: Since the heady days of "Neuromancer", Gibson has established himself as an accomplished, prescient writer. In previous works, it seemed each sentence was imbued with a languid insightfulness, providing truly unique perceptions of a world all readers took on faith. And Gibson always delivered in the end, making his future worlds as clear as real life. In "Pattern Recognition", Gibson presents a world not all that far removed from our own, and it shows. Gone are his pointed observations of humanity and place, replaced with seemingly mundane descriptions of exotic places. In earlier works, the entire world he created was exotic; here, he feels the need to travel to every unusual corner of the modern globe to find anything nearly as weird and intriguing as his own imagination. Unfortunately, the real world may be crazy, but it is a far cry from the completely fictional worlds of previous novels. That said, I did enjoy the story. The plot flows evenly and masterfully from chapter to chapter, place to place. Gibson still utilizes the finer points of writing as he pulls the reader from one page to the next with twists and revelations that force you to plod on despite your body's carnal desire to sleep. My one criticism of the storyline is the entirely bizarre and seemingly contrived ending. After chugging along in an interesting plot, Gibson seems to grow disinterested at his own ending. He wraps up the entire mess in less than 40 pages making sure to tie up every single loose end with an overly simplistic finale. I would prefer he engage, trust, and challenge the reader a little more in the end. To wrap up my own comments, I have to mention the fact that the characterization was a little lacking. Cayce was well rendered and silly in all the right ways, but most other characters lacked sufficient depth. Bigend, the megalomaniacal uber-boss, is the largest offender of the shallowness frontier. He is quirky and eccentric and vaguely interesting, but in the end is completely constructed from cardboard. Other offenders are Dorotea who seems to be little more than a plot device, Boone who is a brief and exceptionally awkward love interest, and Parkaboy, a character entirely defined by his prowess at penning witty email. With all that criticism said, I must confess that I truly enjoyed the book, would recommend it to friends, and appreciate Gibson's foray into the world of mainstream literature, a giant leap from the suffocating world of sci-fi. It may not be "Neuromancer" but it is far better than most of the drivel documenting our present world being published today.
Rating:
Summary: Pattern Recognition - a review by Michael Moore
Review: Pattern Recognition (William Gibson) Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter. She strolls the streets of London and Tokyo, nearly always jet-lagged, but ever so keenly attuned to the evolution of cool. Hypersensitive to labels, both demographic and product, she seems a sort of savant of the pigeon-holing of society. She looks for those strange attractors in our daily lives that somehow form around the Next Big Thing. Curiously, she compulsively eschews fashion in her own wardrobe, attacking signature labels with scissors, or selecting articles of clothing so ecclectic, so narrowly represented in the industry, that they could not possibly be recognized as fashion. I suppose there are such people in the world today, those in the advertising biz who can merely glance at a logo and tell if it's right for the product it represents. But as soon as you begin to think about such a job as the focus of the novel, the story line goes white-hot global. Intrigue comes roaring in on the coat-tails of some patented Gibson technology, which is really only today's back-alley hacks elevated to the status of the commonplace. Soon you begin to find yourself nearly as jet-lagged as our wonderfully intelligent protagonist. Gibson paints this Cayce (pronounced "Case," and this should ring a bell to you Gibson afficianados) as a beyond cool consultant, ultra-urban, but never stuffy or highbrowed. She is as comfortable with streetwise Russians as she is with fashion industry kingpins. As with his previous work, Gibson celebrates the nuances of the global urban community, with characters that live and breathe in architechtural spaces that would barely summon a glance from most of us. His present-tense juxtaposition of characters with wildly different worldviews make this book pop. You just can't stop thinking about it.
In a nod to E-bay enthusiasts, Gibson takes the reader through the streets of London, glimpsing shadowy figures trading in aging Timex computers, WW2 era codewheels, and the choicest of information tidbits. But the overarching, permeating theme in this book is the internet, specifically, a web log that follows a certain freelance footage of the finest film noir, released in many parts, with no apparent sequence or plot, but with stunning cinamatography and direction. Cayce, and several other main characters are "footage-heads." Many would call the love and obsession over this fractionated internet film a higher-order revelation in how such media is processed by the masses. The footage seems to be the biggest next big thing, and Cayce is retained, somewhat reluctantly, to find out who or what is behind its production. As far from his cyberpunk roots as he can write, William Gibson scores a huge hit with Pattern Recognition. Buy this book! Mike Moore
Rating:
Summary: How to be Kuhl (in London, New York, and Moscow)
Review: "Pattern Recognition" by William Gibson is a techno-mystery. I'm hesitant to recommend it. I liked it the same way I liked "Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service" by Erskine Childers. "Riddle" brought to mind 1903, "Pattern" brings to mind 2003. Everything in Pattern is bleeding-edge. Action takes place in London (just left there), Tokyo, and NYC. The (female) main character is like 'Faith Popcorn', a professional trend identifier with major phobia's. (In the real world she would be perscribed anti-depressents.) A media mogul assigns her a quest to find the source of mysterious, compelling film snippets (The Footage) being anonomously posted to the internet. The Footage is getting a cult following on the internet. There is a background plot about her ex-spook father missing in the 9/11 attack. Beautiful people, titanium iBooks, international cell phones, e-mails and websites, cryptography, the NSA and the Russian mafia all get mulched in to solve The Footage mystery and lead to the main character's personal redemption. I liked the way it was written and where/when it took place, not because the story was particularly well plotted.
So, I liked it. But it was a better handbook on how to be cool than a techno-mystery.
Rating: 
Summary: lots of text about nothing much really
Review: The book focuses on style instead of content. It does a good job on the style front and it's readable. Unfortunately the story line is practically nonexistent. The little that is there doesn't fit well logically and in the very end things are explained with information and additional characters yanked out of the blue. Very unsatisfying ending. It's like those old detective stories where in the end it turns out that the murderer was the gardener or cook who was mentioned in a half sentence in the whole book. Gibson's book feels like this, except the gardener doesn't even get a half sentence. It feels as if Gibson wanted to write a book about cool but had no ideas for a real story line. You get everything from leather jackets, to anime but not much originality and creativity. One thing the book certainly deserves: the title for the worlds longest written Apple commercial.
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