Rating: 
Summary: extremely disapointing
Review: William Gibson was my god of SF once when he created a completely new style of writing named Cyberpunk later. I love his early work starting from Burning Chrome over the Neuromancer triology to name a view. His ideas were briliant and gripping, makes the back of my neck tingle just thinking of it. And then there comes Pattern Recognition. Of course as a fan I bought it having awaited a new book with much anticipation. But how surprised was I when after the slow start the book did not take off even after reading half of it and this feeling did not change to the end. I never really wanted to know how the book ended. Isn't this sad? I just kept going because I felt I owe it to Wil who never disappointed me before. The basic tools of his writing are still there: short sentences which most of the time are not even complete in a grammatical sense, a character that has to solve a mystery and travels a lot by trying to achieve that, technology suitable to the time the story is set in. The biggest problem with the book I had is just that, it describes the present. Suddenly William Gibson cannot anymore pepper his story with mindboggling ideas of what is technologically possible in the near future. He takes it from what is all around us right now. It is so commonplace now that it is not interesting at all, it clogs the story and feels more like balast in the progress of things. I even get the impression that Mr. Gibson is not anymore at the epicenter of things and takes his ideas from the daily press. Don't get me wrong, it is not essential to me to have a list of cool gadgets in a story. It just becomes so obvious to me now how much William Gibson dependet on it in the past (and he did a great job with that). Only the main character gets anymore than 2-dimensional but still seems rather stiff and uninteresting to me. The repetition of the girls mantra that stems from a trauma in early youth doesn't really help. So what remains of William Gibsons writing when stripped of fantasies of the future is repetition of phrases that are supposed to sound cool but make me wince and it feels bad like too much icecream. So please Mr. Gibson don't try to become Charles Dickens and do what you can do best, show us the future at its sickest.
Rating: 
Summary: 25?! I can buy the paperback for 11!!!!!!!!
Review: This is completely absurd. Don't charge me more when i'm just buying the data. Completely asinine. someone at amazon needs to take a look at this. It looks almost like a pricing glitch.
Rating: 
Summary: makes me want to clean up my room
Review: A highly personal identification with the main character made me want to clean up my room and sand off the logos off some of personal clothing and accessories. An engrossing read that at points gives the impression it's going to finish a little too neatly, yet doesn't finish in quite the way I expected. Still, the sources of power discovered at the end are a little too extreme and therefore simplistic and too easy a solution for the intricacies explored earlier.
Rating:
Summary: Market research turned adventure
Review: The central idea of this story is that a unique individual, damaged so as to have their soul hovering between life and death, creates spiritual, ethereal works that enthral and attract people. The popularity of this author's 'footage' grows exponentially.This turns the interest of international marketing wonderkind Herbertus Bigend and his firm who hires our hero, Cayce (pronounced 'case') to try to locate this maker. But others are after the same information, and some--with apparent Soviet criminal underworld connections--want to stop her. There are chilling aspects to the book, but it's overall uplifting and dramatic. Gibson's prose adds a lot, usually through interesting descriptions or colorful perceptions.
Rating: 
Summary: smart
Review: Loved the idea of being physically repulsed/affected by logos and marketing styles. Clever and fun to read. I want to order a buzz jacket!
Rating:
Summary: Classic Gibson!
Review: Classic William Gibson. Though, it is a bit odd in that it doesn't have any really science-fictional elements to it at all. Pattern Recognition is set in, basically, modern day Europe, Russia and Japan. Basically, the book is about the search for meaning in mysterious loops of film footage of an unknown source. The chief "footage head", as they're known, is Cayce Pollard, who is the main character. Cayce is a "cool hunter", courted for her innate ability to sense the "coolness" of brands and branding. She's hired by a somewhat slimey advertising executive to find the Source of the Footage. What ensues is a classic Gibson tale filled with twists, technology and, as always, a gritty reality that makes you wonder how many of these places actually exist.
It's a bit of a departure for the Father of Cyberspace and the Cyberpunk movement, though he shuns both titles. There really isn't any science-fiction in this story at all. It's all pretty much the real thing, so if that bothers you, stay away. On the other hand, if you just love Gibson's writing style and his skill with words and narrative, dive right in. Personally, I loved it so much I started reading a book about marketing/cool-hunting when I was done!
Rating:
Summary: Recognize This
Review: A good novel, the first I read by Gibson. I heard a lot about the guy, him being the godfather of cyberpunk and everything so I expected alot of pyrotechnics and stuff. What I got was an unexpectedly understated story. Cayce Pollard too is a very understated person working in the marketing business where everything is about overstatement. So yeah I was hoping for a rollercoaster ride through cyberspace and come out screaming woooo! But I'm glad I got this book instead. BTW this book is so cool it's even got a character from Belgium! (his name is Bigend though, not funny)
Rating:
Summary: wow
Review: I am generally hard to please, but I was very satisfied with this book. It is not an action thriller, but it has a very reasonable intrigue, while the intrigue is developing at a slow pace it keeps you interested and the action line is not something incredibly stupid, characters are well developed and believable, there are no idiotic sex scenes, the action takes to well described exotic places, it is not boring etc etc etc. In other words a pretty entertaining read for an adult reader. There were a couple of things that annoyed me at the beginning. First, overall volvo-liberal environment, but it would admint that one would expect that it is pretty natural for people working on the creative side branding/advertising/market development to be volvo-liberals. Second, I was suspicious about male writer describing inner working of woman's soul, but it came out OK, too. Overall, I would say it is well worth money I spent on this book.
Rating:
Summary: Please stop
Review: I'm a fan of William Gibson's earlier work, but this book was simply bad. There were a couple of cool ideas, such as the main character's alergic reaction to branding, but the story just didn't go anywhere. There was little action, and not much real character development. A few characters where thrown in for reasons that were never made clear, I suppose they were filler. In the end, the "big mystery" isn't very mysterious at all -- this was one of the most disappointing books I've read all the way through. Usually I would have stopped about 1/2 way through, but since it was William Gibson I gave him the benefit of the doubt. Save your money, save your time, read something else. Try Jennifer Government, for example.
Rating: 
Summary: Not fully developed
Review: The basic ideas behind this book and the characters and world created are really quite interesting, but I feel the story plot wasn't polished enough. The good guy vs. bad guy is too simplistic. He weaves Cayce's father into the story pretty intricately... and then doesn't do anything with it, it almost seems like filler - both of her parents can be extracted from the story and it's pretty much the same. I think they were added to justify the interest of the bad guys in Cayce. In short, I wanted Gibson to dive more into the "Pattern Recognition" ideas and groundwork and less into the cliche "mafia's out to get me" type of drama.
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