Pattern Recognition

Rating:
Summary: Recognizing Originality
Review: Sci-fi is not my genre of choice. With some notable exceptions sci-fi writing always has seemed to be the province of geeks (no offense meant) whose boundless and enthusiastic imaginations are disproportionate to their literary abilities. Years ago, someone gifted me with a copy of Mona Lisa Overdrive, and it set that perception on its ear. I was struck by the stylistic originality that seemed to mesh so effortlessly with the concepts and language that steered the narrative. Decades went by before I finally got around to reading Neuromancer, which I found equally engrossing and for the most part delightful to read. While it seemed to stagger a bit at times under the ponderous weight of its originality, it called to mind the old rubric that "the original is the most advanced." Both books, and their author William Gibson, have a fairly large following that exceeds what I would consider "cultish."

I therefore was very surprised a few weeks ago to come across Gibson's latest, Pattern Recognition, in the remainder bin at the local Borders (sorry, Amazon). It turned out to be a find. Gibson just flat out writes well, and I often found myself re-reading passages just for the sheer joy of the language and images. And the story is a pretty good one, too.

The novel is set in the middle of the first decade of the 21st Century, a time that is still heavily influenced by the end of the cold war, the creation of a billionaire upperclass among Russia's voracious new capitalists, and the attack on the World Trade Center. These events provide the historical dynamic against which the process of daily living is increasingly affected by the evolution of a commercialized global culture. It's the texture of that culture that reflects the style of this book, which is edgy, fast-paced, and information-oriented. In this sense, the book is like its precursors. However, unlike them, this novel takes place in our present, and the world inhabited by its characters is entirely familiar to us, as are its brand names, its technology, and its pre-occupation with communications, subliminal marketing, and pervasive "productizing."

At the center of the story is Cayce Pollard. She is a high-priced consultant to the consumer product industry. She is, instinctually, a "cool hunter," paid to spot the next new trend and alert the industry so that it can productize and ride the marketing wave ahead of its crest. She also has an unerring sense of how marketing images will be perceived, and is sort of an infallible one-woman focus group. Her chief leisure pastime has become watching for and commenting to an internet bulletin board on a phenomenon known as "the footage". The footage is an assortment of spectacularly beautiful scenes that crop up anonymously on the net. It becomes an international whisper phenomenon. Who is the creator of these images? Are they part of a single larger work? Is it a work in progress? What is the creator's intent in releasing them in this fashion? As more and more pieces of the footage are discovered, idle curiosity about the footage becomes an obsession. The obsession takes on an edge when Cayce is persuaded by one of her eccentric employers to undertake, at his virtually unlimited expense, the job of finding out the who and the why of the footage. For her, this quest is an ontological one; for her employer, she thinks, it has more to do with harnessing a phenomenon that has captured the attention and engaged the energy of people around the world.

And, oh, it turns out that there are dangers associated with this quest, both physical and psychological, as Cayce must confront not only men with weapons but her own deep-seated fears, and her personal mystery - the truth behind her father's disappearance in Manhattan on 9/11.

These threads all tie together and resolve in a way I found thoroughly satisfactory. This really was a book I couldn't put down. The reason, I think, was because it fused vivid imagination with a very eloquent style, and in this way truly represented the best of its genre.


Rating:
Summary: Mildly entertaining
Review: This was the first William Gibson novel I've read. While it is nice to read a novel that integrates aspects of the modern online world, I was overall not impressed. I think that Gibson has written a satire about society's obsession with triviality.

Cayce, the heroine, has some sort of psychic sense that allows her to proclaim within moments whether a given trademark or logo will "work" or not (as though the trademark of a product is the primary selling point of anything). She gets paid megabucks to jet around the world and give five-minute consultations for rich corporate heads because she's such an accurate precursor of success or failure. Indeed, she's so attuned to trademarks that she obliterates them from all her clothing and personal possessions, although she continues to "notice" every trademark in her field of view (except, mercifully is immune to trademarks in foriegn lands, which she cannot read.) When she encounters a "bad" trademark, she is affected so viscerally that she becomes ill and obsessive, and must recite an odd mantra ("he took a duck in the face at 250 knots...") to clear her head. In her spare time, she and numerous other bloggers across the world are obsessed with the unfolding online revelations of short video clips showing a man and a woman, and spend endless time speculating on who is producing them, why, and whether the video clips represent a finished work or whether it is a work in progress. They debate heatedly about various nuances of the videos and what they could mean, dividing themselves into various fervent factions remininscient of early religious sects. Fortunately for Cayce, the billionaire CEO who hired her for her 5-minute logo consultation is also willing to hire her (with an unlimited expense account) to track down the creator of these mysterious video clips, on the basis of a faint notion that something that can create so much "buzz" might be a new incipient marketing mechanism. Along the way, Cayce is hunted by various mysterious individuals who are not who they seem, and she can trust no one.

Personally I was amused by Gibson's using this format to pontificate upon which logos and brands he dislikes (Tommy Hilfiger, the Michelin Man, etc.) by having his heroine thrown into nausea by the very sight of them. If humanity really does develop into a superficial culture obessed with online cotton candy like this, it will be sad. I only kept reading to see if there ever turned out to be any sort of significance to the themes in the plot, only to discover that there really wasn't. If you are a Gibson fan, perhaps this is zesty fare. But as an appetizer for the uninitiated, it is mostly form and no substance. Gibson depicts a humanity fascinated by momentary glimmers on the surface of cyberspace, never realizing the depths beneath before they flit off to the next thing. Perhaps a future novel will concern the Luddite backlash of a sort of cyberspace Amish faction, who have learned that less is more.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Disappointing
Review: This is the first of William Gibson's novels that I've read, and I must say that I'm pretty disappointed. Doubly so, because it wasn't something I just picked up off the shelf and decided to read; I had been looking forward to reading it for over a year.

The plot was excruciatingly dull, and there was no realism to it at all. I am in the marketing field, and felt more embarrassed by the book than anything. I mean, how could anyone think that the focus of the book--the social implications of "the footage"--could be that valuable, cause so much of a raucous? Seriously.

And the inferred underground and technology was not that appallingly futurific either. I was so looking forward to something that would blow my mind and really make me look at things from a different perspective. This was a huge let down.

I have heard that William Gibson's other books are more intriguing and thought provoking though, so I might check those out.



Rating:
Summary: The Future is Here, We Caught it, or Rather it Caught Us
Review: Cayce Pollard has the uncanny ability to see a new logo and at first sight know whether or not it will be successful, but she also suffers panic attacks when she see bad ones, especially commercial bad ones, like the Michelin Man for example. She is also hampered by the memory of her father's mysterious disappearance in New York on that fateful September day in 2001 that changed everything for America.

In her spare time she is an obsessive follower of the footage, an underground film that is being released piece meal and out of order on the internet, hidden in old archives or ghost sites where only those in the know will find it. The footage has gained a huge cult following, its devotees endlessly discussing it in chat rooms.

Cayce has been hired by the super rich Hubertus Bigend, head of Blue Ant, a very sleek and top of the line advertising agency, to pass judgment on a new logo for a popular footwear product. She arrives tired and jetlagged in London, sees Bigend's brand and says no, it won't go. Bigend, instead of crying in his beer, hires Cayce to track down the makers of the footage. As it turns out the man is a footagehead, too.

Cayce suspects Bigend wants to find the footage maker to exploit the marketing potential of its huge underground success, but she reluctantly agrees and is off on a quest to find what may be the best kept secret in the world. In a search that takes her to Tokyo and Moscow she discovers that the footage actually contains encrypted information and there is far more to it than anybody had imagined.

This thought provoking book is William Gibson at his very best. In this one, he's not writing about an imagined future, the future his here, we caught it, or rather it's caught us. These people on these pages are his best characters, so real I'm still thinking about them and it's been almost a month since I closed the pages, but I'll be starting it again soon. This book is a keeper, one I'll read over and over again. It's a detective story, a thriller and as I said, a thought provoker. It's outstanding.

Rating:
Summary: I Sort of Wanted a Pattern I Didn't Recognize
Review: If "Pattern Recognition" was from any author other than William Gibson, I would give it four stars. Though it won't be on any English lit required reading list fifty years from now it is the quintessential "good read" for the thinking man: It is hip. It is literate. It is fast-paced but consistently thoughtful. But I just think Gibson could do better.

Gibson's heorine is Cayce Pollard, "cool hunter" extraordinaire. She garners a mildly enviable living as a marketing and fashion consultant by wandering the streets of the modern Megalopoli, watching the next generation of modern Western/Asian civilization, and making uncannilly accurate predictions about the next trends in fashion, music, whatever. She also has the unique ability to size up in one ten-second sitting a new marketing logo, intuiting whether it will succeed or not.

Here enters Hubertus Bigend, hyperwealthy London marketing magnate and some time signer of Cayce Pollard's pay checks. Bigend launches Cayce into Gibson's plot by handing her a bottomless corporate credit card and sending her on a literally global hunt for the mysterious genius constructing "The Footage", a series of motion picture frames appearing at unpredicatble times and locations on the internet. "The Footage" may or may not be adding up to a traditional motion picture. It may or may not have some artistic meaning. It may or may not be the creation of a conventional human intelligence. But it has accumulated a cult following of "footage heads" who are absolutely enthralled with the images they see, who spend hours on their .alt newsgroup letting fly with rumors and speculations on its origin and meaning. Cayce Pollard, unbeknownst to Bigend, is already one of the most smitten and loyal footage heads in the world.

And this is where I have to say I have seen this before, delivered by Gibson himself. In Gibson's "Count Zero", Paris art dealer Marly Krushkova plays Cayce Pollard and Euro tycoon Herr Josef Virek plays Bigend, sending Marly/Cayce on a mission to find the mysterious creator of new "boxes", "poems frozen on the boundaries of human experience." Maybe Gibson, is sort of "quoting" himself in "Pattern Recognition", retrofitting his "Count Zero" plot to the turn of the twenty first century. But, I don't know, I guess I just expected to see more of the hallmark creativity that I read Gibson for in the first place.

As in "Count Zero", it turns out that others are also looking for, and attempting to protect, the mysterious artist, others with mysterious agendas and straightforward firearms. Armed with only her credit card and her laptop, Cayce will dodge bullets and bad guys in London, Tokyo, and eastern Europe, in her search for her artist, being helped along the way by e-mails from footage heads the world over.

In Gibson's science fiction, the detail of his imagination makes him the master of creating and evoking unseen worlds. Readers can almost feel the grit beneath their feet on the cracked sidewalks of Gibson's cyberpunk dystopias. But this attention to detail, when turned to contemporary times and places that we all have some middling knowledge of, tends to merely get in the way of the plot of "Pattern Recognition." "Yes, I already know this," I found myself saying several times, or occasionally, "No. This city just isn't *that* weird. Now get on with the story."

But despite all my complaints here, it is a very readable novel, with a rare combination of plenty of action, poignancy, and plenty of "stop and think" moments on the power of media, marketing, the internet, and even international airlines, to redefine our ideas of what constitutes the normal and the desirable in life.

But "Pattern Recognition" still just doesn't clear the bar of imagination that Gibson himself has steadily raised over the past two decades. If you aren't familiar with Gibson, this book might be the place to start. It is a good read, and his other works will be only better. But, if you're looking for the imagination you found in "Neuromancer" or even "Count Zero", be prepared for a bit of a come down.

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: Excellent book; very good narrator on audio CD version.
Review: Exciting plot with plenty of twists. Sort of a techno mystery, with plenty of paranoia. Well developed characters. It is unusual to find a science fiction novel with a female character who is admirable and yet believable and sympathetic. The book is thought provoking, but the writing is not heavy handed. To fully appreciate the early parts of the novel, it helps to have a little background in advertising or retail and/or fashion, but not essential. Many science fiction fans are blissfully oblivious to fashion. :)

Shelly Frasier does a good job of narrating the audio CD version, with vocal nuances that reflect the subtle nuances of the story.

Rating:
Summary: Pertinent Commentary
Review: I can well understand why those who cut their teeth reading Gibson's Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, etc., would find Pattern Recognition very disappointing. However, not being a die-hard sci-fi fan, nor being at all familiar with Gibson, I found his satriric commentary on today's consumerism refreshingly erudite; I liked the way he couched his "terms." I have now read the aforementioned books--and after the first one, all the "cutting-edge" stuff got a bit old, frankly--and although they are fun, "visionary" reads, I think Pattern Recognition holds a stronger message, overall, and no, it's not "cutting edge" in terms of sci-fi, but I admire Gibson's guts to veil social commentary within this genre so accurately and well, keeping it more au curant in terms of its techno-gyrations.