Rating: 
Summary: Haiku Review
Review: Sick of logos and
Addicted to the next cool.
Lonely searcher Cayce.
Rating: 
Summary: A wild postmodern ride, but headed where?
Review: This paperback novel comes with more than 20 blurbs on its covers and first pages. That made me suspicious. More than two dozen brand names are mentioned in the first couple of chapters. I guess that's part of the plot, but this reader was bewildered by those unfamiliar trademarks and all the hype. There's also one hell of a lot of description of clothing and interior decoration. It's quite a mixed bag.
The author of several other novels, all set in the future, Gibson has put this one into the present, but a weird "present" consisting of Hotmail, domains, watermarked film footage, mysterious Russian spies, a female James Bond with a phobia for trademark logos, and lengthy e-mail messages that read as though they all were written by the same person. The heroine is drugged, assaulted, beaten, carted around blindfolded, and exposed to the strangest set of supporting players that could be imagined. In fact, they are far too strange for a novel. Gibson knows the Internet and a good deal of spook stuff--NSA, KGB, MI6, that sort of thing. But the novel lacks a life. I never did figure out why all the hocus-pocus. Only at the end can the protagonist, who lost her dearest and closest friend, her father, on 9/11, break down and cry. The writing is swift and sure, but the similes and metaphors are unpoetic, strained. Frankly, I'm glad it's over.
Rating:
Summary: Recognizing Patterns
Review: started reading William Gibson over the summer, having become inspired to do so after reading up about one of my old favorite tv shows, Max Headroom (the series, not the Cinemax thing). The article mentioned cyberpunk, and how Gibson's Neuromancer was a huge influencing factor for the tv series. Having played, er, "Shadowrun," a Nintendo game directly influenced by Neuromancer, and digging some cyberpunk movies like The Matrix I asked a friend, and later my stepfather, if the book was any good. Both emphatically agreed that it was, and my journey exploring the works of cyberpunk's g0dh34d Gibson began. ...I started with Neuromancer of course. Which I thought was "okay." Then, several months later, I moved on to "Idoru," which I also thought was okay. And then I read his short story "Burning Chrome," which I actually enjoyed a lot. More recently, I read another one of his sprawl books, Count Zero. I read that book right after I read the brilliant Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson, which is not an order that I recommend. Snow Crash goes places that Count Zero should have. For example, that whole voodoo thing in Count Zero is not as deeply fleshed out/explored as Sumerian mythology is in Snow Crash. But, I guess that's another story for someone who actually cares to write some bloated English comparison paper. I just finished his most recent tome, Pattern Recognition, and I highly recommend it. Here's the official blurb about the book: Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected. Unlike Gibson's previous novels, which have been set in the future, PR is set in the near present, in a world we're all too overly familiar with. September 11th is a quiet, yet persistant character. Email is a primary form of communication between disparate strangers who become quick friends over commonalities they wouldn't easily find in real life. Pr0n and p33n spam fill inboxes. I was very easily able to imagine Cayce's world, and follow her and her changing locales (London, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris) easily. And Cayce is a wonderfully flawed heroine. It's amusing that someone in marketing would have a panic disorder (or "allergy," as Cayce calls it) over certain logos and icons, such as the Michilin Man, or Tommy Hilfiger. In a way, it reminded me of Indiana Jones, the bravest man on the planet with a serious fear of snakes. Gibson skillfully uses the search for the meaning and creator of the "footage," mysterious movie snippets that are appearing on the Net and which are under hot debate by members of a footage subculture, to really pull the reader through the story from beginning to end. We want to know more about the footage, but Gibson only provides us little glimpses of what the footage really is, leaving us to Cayce's speculations and our own about what the footage represents. The mystery of the footage becomes the focal point that successfully weaves our interest in the novel. Secondary characters and events only furthered my interest in finding out what happens next, what new bit of information Cayce has uncovered, and how does that help me try to find out who the maker of the footage is before Cayce does. Yes, in a way, I was an active participant in the novel. Trust me, that sounds silly to me. If you can pick it up, I highly recommend this book. It's worthy of a read or three. You won't be disappointed. As an aside, anyone else notice that the hero of Neuromancer and the heroine of Pattern Recognition have the same name... Case--Cayce. *shrugs*
Rating: 
Summary: Back to basics!
Review: While I normally never care for the "fellow author" blurbs on books, I have to say this one is entirely accurate (and since it's from Neil Gaiman, it's doubly true!). Ever since the wonderful impact of Neuromancer, Gibson's subsequent work has been good, but not up to the standard of that first one. Well, I can't say that any more. Pattern Recognition is a masterful work evoking modern disconnectedness and a sense of the internet community at the same time. The pace is fast, the characters real, and the situation more than possible. While the resolution goes a bit past the bounds of normal reality (this is sci-fi after all), it's still a must read from the cyberpunk master.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: For big fans as myself, this book will probably be remembered as his worst to date.
Story line and characters are utterly phony. A Russian mafia princess, disabled by an explosion, has her uncle employ a whole industry to produce snippets of film and disseminate them anonymously over the internet?! A security apparatus employing KGB, NSA, helicopters, jets and international intrigue just to assure the author remains anonymous?! And mind you, the "maker" is not even aware of all this, she seems to be in touch with the outside world only while working!
Then the main character having violent psychosomatic responses when seeing particular trademarks?!
The author was probably aware of these painful shortcomings and tried to prop them with lengthy social/philosophical sidelines. Unfortunately, they drag the story to such a slow beat that if you start reading at page 200 you barely lost anything.
I hope this is just a blip in his career and not part of the larger syndrome of disposable, short-lived celebrity, so painfully obvious in today's music and film
Rating: 
Summary: A compelling premise, a divided culture
Review: After reading Mr. Gibsons' novel there was a haunting feeling, "mirror world" would be his term, of reading a story whose existance was always the next minute ahead of my own, or just beyond my peripheral vision. It certainly is a generational divider, those over the age of, oh, say 45, may have a hard time believing the zeitgeist of many of the many characters. I'll confess in the reading of the novel, it barely passed a rule of thumb I sometimes employ when an authors writing is consciously stylized or a story is intentionally oblique - if you can't get me to care about the characters or the story and I'm closing in on page 100 then it may be a lost cause. I was in the mid 80's when the story and characters finally kicked in, and it was in the end worth the read. When the last page was turned I was left wanting a little more in the way of really desiring to care about the main character but finding little to hold on to. It also seemed to hiccup along as a "thriller" and layered some interesting story lines but never really stood on its own, fully formed. It also left too many questions unanswered about certain relationships, the ultimate resolution of the "footage" and the status of Cayces' father. The trade-off is in the wonderful precision with which Gibson strings together those qualities and voids that constitute what we use to make up our daily life now. It is a book completely of its time, and I suspect for those who are readers of books in our time, sensibilities are left a bit unnerved. You may be left to wonder, as I did, whether those little things (like writing an on-line book review) that you thought only made up a part of your bigger, grander, more significant life were in fact all that there was in this digital age. Unlike Cayce in the novel, there is no "footage" to provide the missing humanity or the artistic soul. Memorable characters....hardly, a truly unique thriller...not quite, but a forceful message and lingering sensibility...and a warning, perhaps.
Rating:
Summary: Bland recognition
Review: I was dying for this book to come out and ordered it as soon as it did. I was disappointed. The book was very much William Gibson in the typical attention to detail and the story jumping all over the place with momentary flashbacks taking pages to describe. The characters are all actually quite probable and much nicer people than any he's ever done before and the story is sort of possible in this world of ours. However, the story is bland and fails to keep me, at least, interested. The tension is missing. I have this feeling that Gibson's star has slowly been falling since the sprawl trilogy (with the last one of that series, Mona Lisa Overdrive, also not being very inspiring). Ironically, it seems that the closer he comes to our modern world, the more mundane his work gets. My personal theory is that the fame, and money, that he made with his first novels has pushed him further away from the need and hunger he had as a poor unknown writer in the Neuromancer and Count Zero days. It's almost as if his proverbial "Edge" has become lost as he no longer had to worry about how to pay the bills and had time to do too much contemplation of his rich, well-travelled, fashion item world from where he draws his inspirations. It would be nice if he could bring back some of that dark intensity that he used to have. Positive messages are nice in comedy and self help books, but are out of place here. Case, where are you?
Rating:
Summary: Surprisingly good
Review: I've never been a Gibson fan. I've read a few of his books out of some sort of obligation to sample the genre (cyberpunk, that is) and been less than impressed. I picked up Pattern Recognition on a whim and was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Two of my qualifications for rather or not I consider a book good is what (if anything) sticks in my mind after reading it, and rather or not I reread it. In the case of the other Gibson books I've read, nothing much sticks in my mind, and I have no desire to reread them. With Pattern Recognition, I found most of the characters memorable. Several of the plot twists surprised and impressed me. The settings resonate. And I just finished reading it for the second time. Gibson's tendency to dwell on details for what can be an inordinate amount of time often bothers me in his writing. There are places in Pattern Recognition where this characteristic becomes jarring, interferes with the pacing, or frustrates. That's really my only quibble with the book, though. The protagonist Cayce is completely believable. Her talents are quirky, but make sense in the context of the character. She doesn't fit into one of the nice neat boxes far too many science fiction authors tend to force female characters into. Sorry, boys. She has feelings, but can rescue herself, doesn't fall for the obvious relationship lure, and has a mind of her own. It's quite a relief to see an author describing a real woman, who is not idealized. One of the pluses, for me, was Gibson's use of what you don't see, of what he doesn't describe. The "footage" which is the heart of the mystery is only described in limited detail and small samples. Gibson describes the reactions of characters to the footage, but very little of the footage itself. The reader must supply their own idea of what sort of images would be so compelling or so haunting. I don't think this book would have been half as interesting if Gibson had described the footage in his usual minute detail. If you're not a Gibson fan, forget what you've heard and read this book on its own merits. If you are a Gibson fan, read the book without keeping the rest of the author's works in mind. On its own merits, this is a wonderful book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent writing, interesting topics, poor development...
Review: I've never been a big Gibson fan; read Neuromancer and was dissapointed. However, the guy did help spawn an entire genre of Science Fiction so I thought I'd give his most recent work a shot; by my definition that means give him 50 pages of my time, if I'm not sucked in, I'll bail. Well, he succeeded in sucking me in. He's a wonderful creative writer and his sentences are like neural candy, organized beautifully, creatively, and with a real unique "cool" style (you'll pick up some new jargon, as well as some trendy concepts). Unfortunately, the story never quite matured the way I'd hoped it would, and I thought the ending was surprisingly poor. Waste of time? Well that depends on who you are I guess, but as busy and involved I am with my daily life I'd call this a worthwhile investment of most peoples time...
Rating: 
Summary: What happened to Gibson?
Review: Boring. Boring characters, boring plot (if you can call it a plot). I have admired Gibson deeply over the years, and have studied his writing because he can draw a character more vividly, and in fewer words, than any author I've ever encountered in any genre. What he leaves unsaid in his novels (i.e. in his previous novels) is what makes the biggest impact of all on the reader, and that is a gift that is beyond deciphering; it can only be relished. Pattern Recognition is a total failure. But then, even great authors are allowed to fail. And Gibson remains a great author, this lemon notwithstanding.
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