Rating: 
Summary: Last in the Chain is the Most Provocative
Review: I spent the last six months or so reading one Gibson book after another. I had read NEUROMANCER years before, finally tried THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, and I was hooked.It is true that PATTERN RECOGNITION has a very different feel from the rest of these books, for one very important reason: the world-changing conclusions of the earlier trilogies are missing. In the NEUROMANCER trilogy, and especially during the IDORU trilogy (beginning with Virtual Light), the feeling as I reached the end was that I had been a witness to a new birth, a new culture forming, a new world being spoken into the chaos. Not so with PATTERN RECOGNITION. "We only have the present" might as well be the book's motto, and a tour-de-force ending would have ruined this theme. Cayce is trapped in her status quo: her profession is sucking the color of the future and transforming it into the grey of the present; her family has been paused for years by the World Trade Center attacks, where her father went missing; the footage that haunts her is timeless and narrative-less, and she hashes and rehashes the same ideas with her friends on the Forum. The action of PATTERN RECOGNITION breaks these patterns for one person, Cayce, not for the rest of the world. In fact, the present world continues unchanged at the end of the book. The footageheads are left wondering about the maker, branding continues without end, the mystery of her father's death is unresolved, no great leap forward of technology reverses the chaos or accelerates it. The footage itself continues to be timeless and narrative-less, trapped in time. But Cayce finds a new home in the present. If you are looking for the cyberpunk visions of Gibson's earlier work, you will come away confused. But this very human vision of our endless present is challenging and emotionally rewarding. The unity of theme, form, plot and character is perfect. You couldn't change a line, or ask for a better book.
Rating:
Summary: Tackling the present
Review: PATTERN RECOGNITION may just be the best book I 've read all year. Brilliantly excecuted in the style of high-style thriller, William Gibson's novel examines the frightened new world of post-Sept. 11th Western culture. Cayce (named after the famed psychic, but pronounce "case") is easily his most memorable protagonist. A woman with a prounounced sensitivity to labels and marketing gimmicks, she is a professional Cool Hunter, on the lookout for the next trend. But she also is haunted by the memory of a father who never returned from downtown Manhattan on Sept. 11th. Traveling from London to Toyyo to Moscow and back, Cayce feels her soul trailing behind her as she follows the coolest of cool, a series of films played out of sync on the Internet, and spelling out some sort of story that the world can only guess at. What she learns is less important than what she picks up along the way, a pronounced sensation of the world in flux, where no one can be trusted, and terrorism can even be found in objects of fashion. This is the only Gibson novel that takes place entirely within the present, which rules out his usual sci-fi label. With PATTERN RECOGNITION, Gibson writes the literary/mainstream novel that contends with the best of the competion.
Rating:
Summary: From Case to Cayce -- Gibson Finally Arrives in the Present
Review: This is Gibson at his best as well as modern fiction at its best. For me, the author had been getting a little, if not predictable, then recycled. His take on the present is both hauntingly familiar and as exotically mysterious as any of his spec futures. As always in Gibson's work, the reader learns to inhabit the book and care about the characters through offhand remarks, snippets of e-mail, random verbal snapshots. The story is not so much narrated as evoked -- very much like the "footage" that is central to the plot. "Pattern Recognition" reveals Gibson as a maturing writer, exploring and contrasting private and cultural emotions of grief, loss and alienation in the wake of 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet State and the insidious nature of modern communication and media.
Rating: 
Summary: good start but disappointingly plays out
Review: In Pattern Recognition, Gibson is a lot closer to home than usual, at least on the surface. The setting, both time and place, are present-day, well-known locales-fairly mundane territory for Gibson. On a deeper level, the book shares much of the same thematic content and tone as his earlier works. As one might expect, he cast a sharply analytic eye to mass consumerism, modern technology's effect on society, globalism, marketing, corporate amorality, etc. They carry no less weight, are no less spot-on and thought-provoking for not being dressed up in their usual sci-fi garb. One could do worse than use this book as a text in a college course on the modern consumer.
The main character is a "cool-finder", which sounds more science fiction than it is (witness recent articles in major news weeklies on the topic), who specializes in an intuitive grasp of whether or not a logo will "work". She also has a virulent allergy to various corporate symbols which plays a major role in the plot, despite which it is nicely understated as social commentary. A major subplot is Cayce's attempt to find the maker of the "footage", a strange series of film footage being released to the internet. Nobody knows what it is, who is doing it, where it takes place, how it is transmitted, or how it is meant to be viewed (in other words, it's received as many David Lynch films are). None of this prevents a world-wide cult following, many of whose adherents swap detailed analyses of the footage in chat rooms. Cayce is hired to find the origin of the footage and must choose between her employer's corporate motivations and her own, which are clearly less profit-oriented. Much of the book focuses on her journey in fits and starts to the scene of the footage, though a constant undercurrent is a subplot involving the supposed death of her father, a former CIA member who disappeared Sept. 11 and is presumed dead.
The tone varies from comic to acidic to academic, but maintains throughout all the variety a subtly melancholic atmosphere that stays with the reader no matter what is happening on the page. The two mysteries are efficiently set up and drawn out, but I found myself caring less and less about their resolution as the book went on. The language is typical Gibson, lyrical at times, sparse at others, clear always. The critical eye roves insightfully over society. But in the end, I found the book disappointing, especially in the last third when it seemed to veer a bit off-direction and more into the stuff of more melodramatic and mundane bestselling novels of the average person accidentally entwined with foreign mafia. Overall, a mixed recommendation. One small addition-if you do decide to pick it up, Jennifer Government (another mixed rec) would make a nice companion novel to read next, as they share many of the same positive and negative attributes.
Rating:
Summary: Gibson's usual superb effort
Review: I consider William Gibson to be one of the finest prose stylists around today; even if he wrote about dull or mundane topics, he would be worth reading for his diamond-hard prose. Along with being a masterful writer, Gibson is also a tremendous science-fiction visionary -- if he were a dull writer, he would still be worth reading for the beauty of his ideas. If you have not read any Gibson, you should probably start with the classic Neuromancer -- a remarkable work of fiction, especially considering that it was published in 1984, when the Internet as we know it was still far off. This book, Pattern Recognition, is in some ways the least typical of Gibson's work -- it is set in the present. It does, however, possess some key elements of Gibson's haunted universe -- the melancholy longing for rare consumer goods from a past era, the uncomfortableness with the power of the corporate mafia, sophisticated military and intelligence equipment, the hard edge of high fashion, and a love of good old technological junk that still somehow manages to work -- discarded old computers and broken-down people. The story, in brief: Cayce Pollard is a highly-paid consultant to big corporations on the design of corporate logos. She has a unique talent which also forms part of her greatest phobia -- she knows good design when she sees it, and has an uncomfortable, phobic reaction to corporate symbols that do not meet her appeal -- the Michelin Man, for instance, makes her physically ill. She is recruited by a new-media CEO named Hubertus Bigend to track down some rare footage that a "garage Spielberg" is releasing in bits and pieces over the web to a small, but fanatical internet newsgroup -- a strange movie, it seems, shot in an unknown place and time. Bigend suspects that the movie could be "branded" and released for big bucks, and wants Cayce, who is one of the avid followers of "the footage" -- to determine its unknown author. The hunt disrupts Cayce's life -- she spends time in London, Japan, and in Russia tracking down the clues to the author's identity. As the same time, she is also trying to resolve a mystery about her father, who disappeared in lower Manhattan during 9/11. In that her father was a retired, high-ranking CIA operative, the search is by no means routine. The book is, like all of Gibson's work, a glimpse into the melancholy soul of another world. Highly recommended.
Rating: 
Summary: High-concept thriller falls flat
Review: This is my first book by William Gibson, and my days as an avid sci-fi reader are years in the past, so I can't comment on how this book fares in comparison with Gibson's prior work or that of his peers. However, I was curious to see how a reputed master of the cyberpunk genre would address the intersection of commerce, popular culture, and the internet in the post-9/11 world. I was initially captivated, but ultimately disappointed, with the result. Protagonist Cayce Pollard is a cool-hunter who makes a living scouting out upcoming trends and passing judgment on advertising logos. Ironically, she is allergic to most brand names and even removes the labels from her clothes. She is obsessed with the "footage," a mysterious series of video clips released over the Internet, and the online community of "footageheads" who try to make sense of it. The story centers on her search for the creator of the footage - a goal she accepts with ambivalence, as those sponsoring her quest surely wish to exploit this artwork and its creator for their own commercial ends. Gibson masterfully portrays a world saturated by consumerism and marketing - but the pop-culture references, overly detailed descriptions of commonplace activities such as checking e-mail and using an internet message board, and even the 9/11 references give the book an already-dated feel. Perhaps this was a deliberate aspect of the author's ironic approach? A bigger problem is that Gibson gives us no reason to care about the characters and what happens to them. We get no sense of what makes the footage and the world of the footageheads so compelling to Cayce, and the subplot regarding her father's disappearance on 9/11 seems like an afterthought. I won't give away whether Cayce succeeds in her quest, but either way, there is no emotional payoff either for Cayce or the reader. Furthermore, though structured as a thriller, the story simply isn't all that thrilling. I forgave Gibson the ridiculous ending in the name of suspension of disbelief, but by the time I got there, I spent more time pondering whether "footage" is an appropriate term for digital video files than caring about how the story turned out.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed--Some Gems, Some Meat, Lots of White Space
Review:
This book has *huge* amounts of white space, and although it came to me highly recommended, over the course of reading every word I rated it at three stars--not nearly as interesting as, to take one book I especially liked, SNOWCRASH.
However, I have raised it to 4 stars because of the gems, such as the loss of the future on page 57, good description of digital watermarking, the enormous distrust of false advertising and false impressions leading to false relations (p 85), the final denouncement of the loss of time and human intimary (p. 302-303), and--overall--the portrayal of web-life, the sympathetic portrayal of Usenet-type groups and their members, the idea of cool ideas and "cool hunter", and the overall representation of mobile information and its vulnerabilities to interception. Having said all that, I found this to be very light reading, half the text a book of this sort might have warranted, and on balance, disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: With Pattern Recognition, Gibson is Back on Track!
Review: William Gibson's new book is great for two reasons - he has gone back to the art of storytelling (sadly missing, I thought, in "All Tomorrow's Parties") and the wonderful interior textures he creates in his multi-layered observations of Cayce Pollard's world. I had to look up words like "trepanning" (that's where they bore a hole in your skull) and "liminal" (threshold) and I'm sure I missed as many references as I caught. I knew about the ZX81s because I owned one when they came out. Didn't become a programmer, though. The point is, you get the idea that Gibson is one extremely present person, catching so many details that most of us miss, and using them to create a marvelously rich texture within an intriguing, suspenseful story. I think his writing is evolving and improving, and with this book, he has gotten better. I read one review trying to say that Gibson is catching up to masters such as "DeLillo and Pynchon." I think Gibson is more accessible, and in a league of his own. Let those guys try and catch up to Gibson!
Rating: 
Summary: A dull book with dull characters
Review: I had a lot of trouble finishing this book. The characters seemed unrealistic and I never grew to care for either the characters or their situation. My reaction at the end of the novel - when the novel's main mystery was revealed - was to say, "so what?"
Rating:
Summary: 48 Times
Review: That's how many times an Apple product is mentioned in William Gibson's latest novel, broken down thusly, iBook: 32 times, Cube: 10 times, Mac: 4 times, iMac: 1 time, Studio Display: 1 time. There's possibly more (since I didn't really start keeping track until a few chapters into the book) but there are at least 48 mentions (in addition to other product mentions, too many to list).
One of the worst book I've ever made myself finish (only out of respect for Gibson's reputation for intelligence) Pattern Recognition is like a script to a bad summer blockbuster...replete not just with gratuitous product placement, but also unnecessary travel and gadget porn...only without the visual effects...or goofy humor...which doesn't give you much to hang on. Gibson uses every opportunity to refer to objects by a brand name (to the point that this book is already outdated). I suppose the only prescient thing about it is that it points to the day writers (musicians and other media makers too) will no longer survive by selling their work through traditional channels...but will operate under the auspices of corporate sponsorship. They'll want people to "steal" their "work"...mere substrate for a virus. This book should have been free...it's the longest most tedious Apple commercial EVER!! ...
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