Original review by Elaine Frei:
I spent a good portion of the time I was reading Pattern Recognition wondering when it was going to turn into a science fiction novel, since that is what it is supposed to be. It’s author is William Gibson, the father of “cyberpunk”, after all. And I found the thing in the science fiction section of my local library. At one point I even looked back at the spine of the book for the library’s tag - and sure enough, it was marked “FS”. It hadn’t been mis-shelved. I was a little confused, I guess, because “Pattern Recognition” doesn’t have any of the usual trappings of traditional science fiction. There are no rocket ships. No alien civilizations, be they friendly or invading. It is set in the present, in the wake of September 11, in fact, with no time travelers or historical anachronisms. The interesting thing is, even without any overt hint to mark it as science fiction, this novel - which reads very much like a post-cold war mystery thriller at times - started to nevertheless feel like science fiction about halfway through.
The story told by the novel concerns Cayce (pronounced “Case”, she insists) Pollard, a woman whose freelance career in advertising is driven primarily by the fact that she has a natural, visceral - and sometimes allergic, bordering on phobic - reactions to product logos. She is very good at what she does. One of the executives she has done business with asks Cayce to track down the maker of snippets of an enigmatic film that have been appearing anonymously on the Internet. Not sure she trusts this man she nevertheless enters into the hunt, mostly because she has become one of the many people who are fascinated almost to the point of obsession by these mysterious bits of cinema. Cayce is already involved in another search, for the answer to what happened to her father, a retired cold warrior who was last seen in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. Between these two quests, Cayce ends up running down clues in places like Tokyo and Moscow. It would be unfair to say whether or not she finds what she is looking for, in either case. You’ll just have to read Pattern Recognition to find out.
I was a little leery of reading Pattern Recognition. I had never read William Gibson before, having been a little put off by the “cyberpunk” label. In all honestly, I only picked the book up off the library shelf because I remembered reading a review of it when it was published and thinking that it sounded like an interesting story. Then, when I began to read, I discovered that the story is told in the present tense. This literary device usually irritates me enough that I rarely finish books which are written that way. So, my hopes for finishing the book were not high. By the time I was just a few pages in, however, I realized that I was already hooked by the story. It is tightly written, well told, and very involving. And, I have come to the conclusion, it is very much science fiction - although I couldn’t for a moment explain why. It just has that feeling about it.
I spent a good portion of the time I was reading Pattern Recognition wondering when it was going to turn into a science fiction novel, since that is what it is supposed to be. It’s author is William Gibson, the father of “cyberpunk”, after all. And I found the thing in the science fiction section of my local library. At one point I even looked back at the spine of the book for the library’s tag - and sure enough, it was marked “FS”. It hadn’t been mis-shelved. I was a little confused, I guess, because “Pattern Recognition” doesn’t have any of the usual trappings of traditional science fiction. There are no rocket ships. No alien civilizations, be they friendly or invading. It is set in the present, in the wake of September 11, in fact, with no time travelers or historical anachronisms. The interesting thing is, even without any overt hint to mark it as science fiction, this novel - which reads very much like a post-cold war mystery thriller at times - started to nevertheless feel like science fiction about halfway through.
The story told by the novel concerns Cayce (pronounced “Case”, she insists) Pollard, a woman whose freelance career in advertising is driven primarily by the fact that she has a natural, visceral - and sometimes allergic, bordering on phobic - reactions to product logos. She is very good at what she does. One of the executives she has done business with asks Cayce to track down the maker of snippets of an enigmatic film that have been appearing anonymously on the Internet. Not sure she trusts this man she nevertheless enters into the hunt, mostly because she has become one of the many people who are fascinated almost to the point of obsession by these mysterious bits of cinema. Cayce is already involved in another search, for the answer to what happened to her father, a retired cold warrior who was last seen in the vicinity of the World Trade Center on the morning of September 11, 2001. Between these two quests, Cayce ends up running down clues in places like Tokyo and Moscow. It would be unfair to say whether or not she finds what she is looking for, in either case. You’ll just have to read Pattern Recognition to find out.
I was a little leery of reading Pattern Recognition. I had never read William Gibson before, having been a little put off by the “cyberpunk” label. In all honestly, I only picked the book up off the library shelf because I remembered reading a review of it when it was published and thinking that it sounded like an interesting story. Then, when I began to read, I discovered that the story is told in the present tense. This literary device usually irritates me enough that I rarely finish books which are written that way. So, my hopes for finishing the book were not high. By the time I was just a few pages in, however, I realized that I was already hooked by the story. It is tightly written, well told, and very involving. And, I have come to the conclusion, it is very much science fiction - although I couldn’t for a moment explain why. It just has that feeling about it.
