Pattern Recognition

By Dave Karlotski
HippoPress.com

"Pattern Recognition," by William Gibson, Putnam, 2003

Al Gore may not have invented the Internet, but author William Gibson did, in fact, invent cyberspace. Look it up: he coined the term in his 1984 science fiction novel "Neuromancer," and both the word and the book helped shape the future.

Since then, Gibson's books have crept backwards in time: "Neuromancer" and its sequels were set well into the 21st century, but "Virtual Light" (1993) was set in 2005. His new book, "Pattern Recognition," is set in the present and is not even sci-fi.

Yet, somehow, it is. It is so utterly and wholly a Gibson work, so luminous and resplendent in world-building details, peopled as intricately and colorfully with brands, logos, trends, and technologies as it is with actual people, that it seems as if he is still writing science fiction, still writing about the future except that by chance we are now living in it, struggling to stand at the rushing confluence of his stories and our time like Stephen King's desperate and wonderstruck travelers in "The Langoliers."
Cayce Pollard is a coolhunter, a kind of super-sensitive marketing consultant who reacts physically to trends and trademarks, uncannily anticipating the desires of crowds. Not only does she tear the labels out of her clothing, she has to file the logos off of buttons to avoid the nausea they cause her.

On her own time, she's obsessed with the footage, a strange series of film fragments that continue to surface on the Internet. A whole subculture of worship and debate has sprung up around the footage. Who made it/makes it, and how? Is it a finished work, released in pieces, or a work in progress? Cayce spends hours online in discussion forums exploring the footage with others, to the point where some of her closest friends she knows only by their Web handles.

Called to London to approve a redesign of a major footwear corporation's logo, Cayce's professional life slides sideways into her personal life when she is offered a chance to find the footage's maker.

In his science fiction Gibson has always painted equal-opportunity futures, neither definitively good nor bad, and that sets him apart from many science fiction authors who lecture their audience and give tours of their creations. Gibson may not understand his worlds any better than we do, may not be able to apprehend his created futures any better than we can the present, lost in the tall grass as we are, and that is what makes his worlds so true.

But they're always beautiful futures, beautiful in their ambiguity, beautiful in their spinning systems of light and dark, as if beauty is the one main thing that he sees in even a broken world. In "Pattern Recognition" Gibson finds this same beauty in the present, in our real, actual, non-fictional present: the beauty and wonder of a G4 Cube, of a black mechanical Curta calculator, of Google, of a meticulous reconstruction of a WWII jacket, of a lonely man falling in love with a made-up woman on the Internet, the beauty of brands and products and shifting subcultures, the unabashed beauty of our actual strange, sad, spinning world.

"Pattern Recognition" unfurls gently from the settling dust of Sept. 11, 2001, the day on which Cayce's father disappeared in New York City. No one can place him at the towers, and he had no business there, but still, on that day he disappeared: as if any of it made sense. Disconnected from the beginning, Cayce spends the whole book jetlagged, more and more severely so as she travels farther around the world and falls ever more out of sync with it in pursuit of her odd personal passions.
While the ending of the book is not strong-like many of Gibson's books, it really just stops-his work evoking the world of his story is so compelling that this is easily forgiven. The details of "Pattern Recognition" are so bright and numerous that it's hard to imagine any one author seeing so much or so well.

Maybe Gibson's not writing about the present at all-maybe the present doesn't exist anymore, long since worn down to a thin strand over which the frothy surf of new technology is continually breaking, making of us startled, wet-toed waders in the shallow coastal waters of the future. As such, "Pattern Recognition" shows that William Gibson is exactly the person to write about us.

Dave Karlotsk can be reached at hippo@hippopress.com