Pattern Recognition (novel)
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Pattern Recognition is William Gibson's eighth novel, published in 2003. Although set in the immediate past and referring to real-world technology, it's still often considered a work of science fiction. John Clute of Science Fiction Weekly referred to it as "SF for the new century." [1]
The book contains a scathing critique of viral marketing. As is characteristic with Gibson novels, Pattern Recognition is replete with neologisms. Some of the most memorable are gender-bait, a male posing as a female online to elicit positive responses; and cool-hunter, which Gibson picked up from the marketing industry, where it had been in use for some years. (See the 2001 PBS documentary, The Merchants of Cool.)
The novel inspired Sonic Youth to write a song of the same title, which opens with the lyric "I'm a cool hunter making you my way" and appears on their 2004 album, Sonic Nurse.
The book was first published in the United States of America by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 2003, ISBN 0-425-19293-8.
A film adaptation of the book is currently in production, to be directed by Peter Weir.
Plot
The novel is set during the summer of 2002, primarily in London, New York, Tokyo and Russia. The first major literary work to respond to the events of 9/11, it does so mostly by indirection. An overwhelming, unavoidable fact of daily existence, the disaster is barely mentioned, yet its memory pervades everything.
The novel's heroine, Cayce Pollard, has a psychological hypersensitivity that causes her to have allergic reactions to brands and corporate logos - which makes her the ideal advertising consultant, as the strength of her reactions indicate the hipness of a pitch or brand. The plot develops as she is drawn into a mystery surrounding snippets of film footage that are placed at random locations on the Internet for their growing base of admirers to find and puzzle over.
This mystery dovetails for Pollard with the mystery of what happened to her father on 9/11, who had flown to NYC for unknown reasons the day before and was last seen getting into a taxi in midtown Manhattan at 7 a.m. on the morning of the attacks. In the course of her international travels (both for business and in her pursuit of answers), Pollard is caught up in the ramifying interconnections between all terrorist acts.
External links
- PR-Otaku: Logging and annotating William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
- William Gibson Books: Pattern Recognition; author's site
- "The Case of the World", by John Clute, Science Fiction Weekly, February 24, 2003