Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
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Book Summary Information
Author: William GibsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2004-02-03
ISBN: 0425192938
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Berkley Trade
Book Reviews of Pattern Recognition
Book Review: "He took a duck in the face at two hundred and fifty knots."
Summary: 4 Stars
One of the first things that struck me about Pattern Recognition was how hard it was to date. Despite all the little cues that told me that it was set in the present, Gibson makes the world so strange that I can hardly recognize it.
Welcome to the world of Cayce Pollard.
Named by her mother after the famous psychic Edgar Cayce, Cayce seems to share his talent for prophecy. She is a prophet of patterns. Given a brand logo, she can say with certainty whether it has the ability to embed itself into the fabric of cool and everyday life. As attuned as she is to brand and image, Cayce attempts to divest herself as much as possible of all logos or markings. She even has a strong phobia response to certain patterns, certain logos, certain designs.
With her talent for pattern recognition, Cayce is ideal for a role as a new kind of detective. She turns her talent for coolhunting to the search for the author of compelling and unattributed footage that has been appearing online and developed a cult following.
Gibson does a masterful job of bringing the reader into her world. His prose skills are still nearly unmatched in speculative fiction. His inimitable minimalist style is in top form with this novel. While most of his contemporaries are struggling with making the future familiar, Gibson estranges us from our here-and-now-- no mean feat.
How well you respond to this book will be partly determined by how much you like the minimalism of the project. In one passage of the book, an artist pares a film down by stages into a single image-- obsessively looking for the kernal of truth. There is some of that to the plot points here and it is not always comfortable to read. I found that while I liked Cayce and responded to her well, I was not able to follow her in the obsession with the footage and was ultimately not as interested as I should have been in the identity of the maker.
Recommended for Gibson fans and fans of speculative fiction. It would also make an interesting gift for friends interested in memes, branding, or popular culture.
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