Cons: The climactic Big Explanation left me somewhat confused, but that could just be me.
The Bottom Line: The Bottom Line checked its VisiTech8000 night-vision goggles, adjusted a buckle on its heat-deflecting suit, and leaped off the crumbling fire escape into the rain-soaked alley below.
disinclined's Full Review: William Gibson and Shelly Frasier - Pattern Recogn...
Cyberpunk has been around for almost exactly as long as I have (I was born in 1979, cyberpunk in 1980 with Bruce Bethke’s short story “Cyberpunk”). I think I timed it pretty well, having had the good fortune to be around for the rise of the personal computer and the increasing ubiquity of ever-smaller high-tech accessories. But this also means that my experience of the world has always been informed by cyberpunk – that genre defined by “themes of total human/computer interfaces, technologically enhanced human beings, and an overriding pessimism about the future” (www.artandculture.com). William Gibson wrote the seminal Neuromancer in 1984, launching the cyberpunk movement, and blazed a trail for future sci-fi writers like Neal Stephenson and Jeff Noon. Their novels, “pitting techno-savvy outsiders – often surgically enhanced with high-tech ‘cyber’ implants – against a devouring, antihuman artificial-intelligence complex run amok,” would eventually end up in my chubby little sci-fi-geek hands, filling me with the helpless and chronic longing to be a futuristic outlaw in a cyberpunk world.
Gibson is back with 2003’s Pattern Recognition, set not in some distant dystopic future but our own time, where consumers rule the economy, and marketing rules consumers. Cayce Pollard is a young woman with a very special trait – she’s intensely brand-sensitive, suffering allergic reactions in the presence of advertising. Cayce herself is only able to wear the plainest grayscale clothing, with all labels and identifying marks cut or sanded off. But in a world where more money is spent on advertising than on developing the products themselves, Cayce’s sensitivity is highly lucrative. Labeled a “coolhunter” by an industry wag, Cayce works as an advertising consultant to mega-firms: they place a logo before her, she gives the gladiatorial thumbs-up or thumbs-down. And that’s it. Cayce’s decision is never questioned; her specialty is too well known in the business for that. It’s not that Cayce personally likes or dislikes what she sees – she’s just a human litmus test for the elusive notion of “cool.”
In her spare time, Cayce works toward solving the mystery of an underground art-film movement. Brief fragments of footage are regularly released online, “hidden” in old archives or ghost sites where techie followers swiftly discover them. The fragments always feature the same man and woman, and are seemingly free of any identifying characteristics that could pin the footage down to a specific time or place. So far, the footage does not follow a linear narrative, and does not appear to have been released in chronological order; “footageheads” violently debate online the origins and maker(s) of the mysterious clips. Cayce finds the footage fascinating; like her, the film is timeless and brandless, a rarity in a world permeated by advertising. Posting regularly to a site called Footage:Fetish:Forum, Cayce discusses the material endlessly with her similarly obsessed peers, though nobody’s come up with any evidence yet.
Visiting London on a consulting job for Blue Ant, a sleek and expensive advertising agency, Cayce receives a highly unusual proposition from Blue Ant’s owner, the unspeakably wealthy and completely untrustworthy Hubertus Bigend. Turns out Bigend is a footagehead, too, with one big difference: he’s a footagehead with enough cash to finance a money-no-object hunt for the filmmaker(s). He wants to team Cayce up with Boone Chu, a Chinese-American hacker, and sic them on the anonymous makers. Deeply suspicious of Bigend, but even more deeply desirous of solving the mystery, Cayce reluctantly agrees to the partnership, and they’re off on a globetrotting quest to find what may indeed be the best-kept secret in the world: the name of the maker.
Cayce is astonishingly convincing as a twentysomething Gen-Xer, a representative specimen of loneliness and blurred identity battered by relentless commercial hype. Like many of us (okay, okay...like many of us geeks), Cayce’s most genuine personal connections are made through cyberspace; her parents are both lost to her in different ways (her father missing in the 9/11 disaster, her mother taking refuge in a hippie commune monitoring spirit voices from the ether), her closest friend lives on another continent, and her most esteemed colleague is a footagehead whose real name she doesn’t even know. Sound familiar? It should.
Gibson spits out whippy, barbed prose with an edgy, slangy feel, and dialogue so deft and natural that you hardly notice it’s there. Couching his narrative in a world-weary, cynically comic tone, Gibson dishes out some funny moments, as when Cayce ponders Tommy Hilfiger: “There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul.” Gibson repeatedly rips Starbucks a new one throughout the narrative as well, and though these complaints against omnipresent mega-corporations are hardly new, they’re well suited to the setting and the tale. Equal parts social commentary and action-packed sci-fi, Pattern Recognition gives the lie to the notion that cyberpunk is dead; if anything, it’s closer to becoming part of our reality than ever (much to my inner sci-fi geek’s delight).
In a post-9/11 world, the present is as unpredictable as any future... Paid to predict the hottest trends, Cayce Pollard is in London to evaluate the ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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