|
|
 |
- Hardcover: 368 pages
- Publisher: Putnam Pub Group;
; (January 27, 2003)
- ISBN: 0399149864
|
|
|
Book
Description
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 loyalty
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.
The first of
William Gibson's usually futuristic novels to be set in the
present, Pattern Recognition is a masterful snapshot of
modern consumer culture and hipster esoterica.
Set in
London, Tokyo, and Moscow, Pattern Recognition takes the
reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry
marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob
bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out
spies, cultural documentarians, and our heroine Cayce Pollard--a
soothsaying "cool hunter" with an allergy to brand
names.
Pollard is among a cult-like group of Internet obsessives
that strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious
collection of video moments, merely called "the
footage," let loose onto the Internet by an unknown
source.
Her hobby and work collide when a megalomaniac client
hires her to track down whoever is behind the footage. Cayce's
quest will take her in and out of harm's way in a high-stakes
game that ultimately coincides with her desire to reconcile her
father’s disappearance during the September 11 attacks in New
York.
Although he forgoes his usual future-think tactics, this
is very much a William Gibson novel, more so for fans who
realize that Gibson's brilliance lies not in constructing new
futures but in using astute observations of present-day cultural
flotsam to create those futures.
With Pattern Recognition, Gibson skips the
extrapolation and focuses his acumen on our confusing
contemporary world, using the precocious Pollard to personify
and humanize the uncertain anxiety, optimistic hope, and
downright fear many feel when looking to the future.
The novel is filled with Gibson's lyric descriptions and
astute observations of modern life, making it worth the read for
both cool hunters and their prey. --Jeremy Pugh
|
. |
