Pattern Recognition Author:William Gibson 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 loyal... more »ty 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.
Still, Cayce is her father's daughter, and the danger makes her stubborn. Win Pollard, ex-security expert, probably ex-CIA, took a taxi in the direction of the World Trade Center on September 11 one year ago, and is presumed dead. Win taught Cayce a bit about the way agents work. She is still numb at his loss, and, as much for him as for any other reason, she refuses to give up this newly weird job, which will take her to Tokyo and on to Russia. With help and betrayal from equally unlikely quarters, Cayce will follow the trail of the mysterious film to its source, and in the process will learn something about her father's life and death.« less
A fabulous book for the nerdy and pseudo-scientific. A fun story with an interesting take on how our consumer culture has affected the world and it's people. If you can't get around an artistic use of language (not quite ala Clockwork Orange) then this book isn't for you.
Cayce is a woman who gets physically ill when she sees a poorly designed logo. This rare gift pulls her into a mystery that unfolds in a typical Gibson world of high-technology and twisted characters. This is a page turner, and not for sci-fi fans only.
This was a wonderful book. It was hard to read at first because of the style of writing . Once I caught on to the writing style I really enjoyed it. It is about the computer culture and world politics around characters in their late 20's to mid 30's. The book is a thriller that takes place in England, Japan, and Russia. The story is about some footage on the computer that is being traced and there is a counter culture following the footage and trying to find the source. In steps the big bad guys!!!
Much has been made of Gibsons latest not being science-fiction and its not but its still Gibson, much like Cryptonomicon was still Neal Stephenson. Incidentally, I'd highly recommend this book to fans of Cryptonomicon, as well as to anyone who has enjoyed any of Gibson's other books.
The cyberpunk attitude is still there, as the plot interweaves the world of high tech with subculture, organized crime, and the lives of individuals just instead of in the near future, its happening now.
Cayce is a young woman with an unusual neurosis shes phobic about brand names and logos which can cause serious problems when shes walking around todays advertising-rich, fashion-conscious cities. However, shes made this psychological tic work for her shes in high demand as a marketing consultant who can tell if a proposed logo will be a hit or not.
In her free time, Cayce hangs out in an online chat forum devoted to discussing the footage a collection of video clips that have been anonymously released onto the Internet. The high quality of the video and the mystery surrounding the clips provenance have intrigued a growing number of film fans so many in fact, that Cayce is hired to find out who the filmmaker is, since the marketing strategy is so brilliant.
Little does she guess that the search will bring her from her New York City apartment to London, Tokyo, and Moscow, involving her with vicious businesspeople who may be cutthroat in more ways than one, Cold War era spies, mobsters, millionaires, hired thugs, computer nerds, dealers in vintage calculators, conceptual artists and other odd characters.
The books got suspense, mystery, action but its also full of really interesting ideas and bits of information.
It also truly excels at conveying both the feel and details of visiting cities overseas their similarities and small differences, the disconnect and the exoticism I got that yes! Its just like that!! feeling a LOT with both the London and Tokyo scenes. Moscow, Im not sure I havent been there. But I suspect that Gibson visited both London and Tokyo during the writing of the book but not Russia.
In the future, I suspect people will read this book to gain a feel for what it was like to live at the dawning of the 21st century and theyll get some pretty accurate information (mixed in with the spy thriller stuff!).
Gibson strikes again! What should we, as individuals, be valued for? And what will society find valuable about us? As a retiree from a pressure-cooker career, Gison continually surprises me with his insights. I give books ten or twenty pages to interest me. If they don't, I chuck them. Not Gibson. I find anything he writes difficult to put down.
