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Pattern Recognition (novel)
Encyclopedia
Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction
writer William Gibson
published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard
, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols. The action takes place in London
, Tokyo
, and Moscow
as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet.
The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization. The September 11, 2001 attacks
are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century. Critics identify influences in Pattern Recognition from Thomas Pynchon
's postmodern detective story The Crying of Lot 49
.
Pattern Recognition is Gibson's eighth novel and his first one to be set in the contemporary world. Like his previous work, it has been classified as a science fiction and postmodern
novel, with the action unfolding along a thriller plot line. Critics approved of the writing but found the plot unoriginal and some of the language distracting. The book peaked at number four on the New York Times Best Seller list
, was nominated for the 2003 British Science Fiction Association Award
, and was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award
and Locus
Awards.
, published seven novels (one co-written) and numerous short stories beginning in 1977. His previous novel, All Tomorrow's Parties
, was published in October 1999 as the conclusion of the Bridge trilogy
. Pattern Recognition was written between 2001 and 2002 while Gibson was living in Vancouver
, British Columbia
and released in February 2003. Pattern Recognition was originally intended to be a stand alone novel, but afterwards Gibson wrote Spook Country
and Zero History
which take place in the same universe and use some of the same characters.
Gibson traveled to Tokyo in 2001 to prepare for this new novel, which takes place in London, Moscow, and Tokyo. He did not travel to London or Moscow but used interviews with friends and internet resources for research. In September 2001 Gibson had written about 100 pages but was struggling to finish. He stopped writing after watching the September 11, 2001 attacks
on television and "realized [the novel] had become a story that took place in an alternate time track, in which Sept. 11 hadn't happened". He considered abandoning the novel but a few weeks later re-wrote portions to use the attacks as a motivating factor for the distress the main character feels. In a 2003 interview he said, "There I was, in the winter of 2001, with no idea what the summer of 2002 was going to be like. ... In the original post-9/11 draft, London felt more like London is feeling right now. Cayce keeps seeing trucks full of soldiers. But I took that out, because as it got closer to the time, it wasn't actually happening."
, who reacts to logos and advertising as if to an allergen
, arrives in London in August 2002. She is working on a contract with the marketing firm Blue Ant to judge the effectiveness of a proposed corporate logo for a shoe company. During the presentation, graphic designer Dorotea Benedetti becomes hostile towards Cayce as she rejects the first proposal. After dinner with some Blue Ant employees, the company founder Hubertus Bigend
offers Cayce a new contract: to uncover who is responsible for distributing a series of anonymous, artistic film clips via the internet. Cayce had been following the film clips and participating in an online discussion forum theorizing on the clips’ meaning, setting, and other aspects. Wary of corrupting the artistic process and mystery of the clips, she reluctantly accepts.
A friend from the discussion group, who uses the handle Parkaboy, privately emails her saying a friend of a friend has discovered an encrypted watermark
on one clip. They concoct a fake persona, a young woman named Keiko, to seduce the Japanese man who knows the watermark code. Cayce, along with an American computer security specialist, Boone Chu, hired to assist her, travels to Tokyo to meet the man and retrieve the watermark code. Two men attempt to steal the code but Cayce escapes and travels back to London. Boone travels to Columbus, Ohio to investigate the company that he believes created the watermark. Meanwhile, Blue Ant hires Dorotea who reveals that she was previously employed by a Russian lawyer whose clients have been investigating Cayce. The clients wanted Cayce to refuse the job of tracking the film clips and it was Dorotea's responsibility to ensure this.
Through a completely random encounter Cayce meets Voytek Biroshak and Ngemi; the former an artist using old ZX81 microcomputers as a sculpture medium, the latter a collector of rare technology (he mentions purchasing Stephen King's word processor, for example). Another collector, and sometime 'friend' of Ngemi's, Hobbs Baranov, is a retired cryptographer and mathematician with connections in the American National Security Agency
. Cayce strikes a deal with him: she buys a Curta calculator
for him and he finds the email address to which the watermark code was sent. Using this email address Cayce makes contact with Stella Volkova whose sister Nora is the maker of the film clips.
Cayce flies to Moscow to meet Stella in person and watch Nora work. Nora is brain damaged from an assassination attempt and can only express herself through film. At her hotel, Cayce is intercepted and drugged by Dorotea and wakes up in a mysterious prison facility. Cayce escapes; exhausted, disoriented and lost, she nearly collapses as Parkaboy, who upon Cayce's request was flown to Moscow, retrieves her and brings her to the prison where the film is processed. There Hubertus, Stella and Nora's uncle Andrei, and the latter's security employees are waiting for her. Over dinner with Cayce, the Russians reveal that they have been spying on her since she posted to a discussion forum speculating that the clips may be controlled by the Russian Mafia
. They had let her track the clips to expose any security breaches in their distribution network. The Russians surrender all the information they had collected on her father’s disappearance and the book ends with Cayce coming to terms with his absence while in Paris with Parkaboy, whose real name is Peter Gilbert.
, which briefly use the future tense, are told by Gibson as "a Benjaminian
seed of time", as one reviewer calls it, because of the monistic and lyrical descriptions of Cayce's relationship to objects with the attacks in the background. Two neologisms appear in the novel: gender-bait and mirror-world. Gibson created the term mirror-world to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets. Gender-bait refers to a male posing as a female online to elicit positive responses. The term coolhunter
, not coined by Gibson but used in the marketing industry for several years, is used to describe Cayce's profession of identifying the roots of emerging trends.
The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a motif
representing a break with the past with Cayce's father, who disappears during the attacks, as the personification of the 20th century. Gibson viewed the attacks as a nodal point after which "nothing is really the same". One reviewer commented that in "Gibson's view, 9-11 was the end of history; after it we are without a history, careening toward an unknown future without the benefit of a past—our lives before 9-11 are now irrelevant." Cayce's search for her father and Damien's excavation of the German bomber symbolize the historicist search for a method to interpret people’s actions in the past. Coming to terms with her father’s disappearance may be interpreted as a requiem for those lost to the 20th century, something that may have been influenced by Gibson coming to terms with the loss of his own father.
The film clips are a motif used to enhance the theme of the desire to find meaning or detect patterns. They are released over the internet and gain a cult following, in the same way that the lonelygirl15
videoblog gained an international following in 2006. Corporate interest in the footage is aroused by its originality and global distribution methods. The characters debate whether the anonymous clips are part of a complete narrative or a work in progress, and when or where they were shot. This enigmatic nature of the footage is said to metaphorically represent the nature of the confusing and uncertain post-9/11 future. The author Dennis Danvers
has remarked that the footage being edited down to a single frame is like the world compressed into a single novel. The footage, released freely to a global audience with a lack of time or place indicators, has also been contrasted to Pattern Recognition written under contract for a large corporation and which uses liminal name-dropping that definitively sets it in London, Tokyo, and Moscow in 2002.
with the constant risk of apophenia
. Followers of the seemingly random clips seek connections and meaningfulness in them but are revealed to be victims of apophenia as the clips are just edited surveillance camera footage. Likewise, Cayce's mother turns to investigating electronic voice phenomena
after Cayce's father disappears. Science fiction critic Thomas Wagner underscores the desire for meaning, or pattern recognition
, using a comparison between the film clips and Cayce's search for her father after the attacks:
to objectively interpret patterns. The review in The Village Voice
calls this search "a survival tactic within the context of no context—dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning".
, Hobbs Baranov, and Voytek's planned ZX81 show, Gibson raises the question of how a contemporary society views past societies. Gibson portrays the past century as dominated by conflict, suspicion, and espionage. Following the disappearance of Cayce's father, a designer of embassy security systems, on September 11, 2001, Cayce is left feeling "ungrieved" until she reviews footage and records of that day tracking his movements until he vanishes.
Following this line of thought Gibson raises the question of how the future will view today's society. The novel "adopts a postmodern historicism
" perspective, through the arguments presented by Bigend, Cayce, and Parkaboy. Bigend and Cayce's view of history are compared to those of philosopher Benedetto Croce
in that they believe history is open for interpretation when re-written from the frame of reference of another society. Parkaboy rejects this view, believing that history can be an exact science.
, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."
One critic points out that the marketing agency Blue Ant is named after the wasp Blue Ant
: "it's a wasp with a painful sting. The female hunts for a ground-dwelling cricket. She paralyses it with a sting and lays her egg on it. The still living yet immobile cricket becomes food for the wasp's young. What a clever metaphor for the process of targeting, commodifying, and marketing cool." On the other hand, as Rudy Rucker
notes, while new art is constantly threatened by commodification, it is dependent on the monoculture for its launching point and uniqueness. Gibson's product positioning language and Cayce's analysis of consumerist trends show that society is not a victim of consumerism, but rather its creator who helps shape it without ever stepping outside it. Alex Link argues that rather than a simple attack on consumerism outright, the novel outlines a complex interrelationship between art, brand design, and terrorism as varying attitudes to history, terror, and community.
calls it "a kind of hyped-up name-dropping ... [where] an encyclopaedic familiarity with the fashions ... [creates] class status as a matter of knowing the score rather than of having money and power". He also calls it "postmodern nominalism" in that the names express the new and fashionable. This name-dropping demonstrates how commercialism has created and named new objects and experiences and re-named (or re-created) some that already existed. This naming includes nationalities; there are eight references to nationality (or locality) in the first three pages. Zeidner wrote that the novel's "new century is unsettlingly transitional making it difficult to maintain an individual identity". One character argues that "there will soon be no national identity left … [as] all experience [will be] reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing." This is juxtaposed against the footage that contains no hints of time period or location. Globalization is represented by characters of varying nationalities, ease of international travel, portable instant communication, and commercial monoculture recognizable across international markets. As an example, Gibson writes how one ‘yes or no’ decision by Cayce on the logo will impact the lives of the people in remote places who will manufacture the logos and how it will infect their dreams.
explained the use of science fiction as a narrative strategy:
These elements, and the use of the September 11, 2001 attacks as a breaking point from the past, led academics to label it a postmodern novel
. The attacks mark the point where the 'modern', that is the 20th-century certainty in society's advancement towards a better future, changed to the 'postmodern', that is the 21st-century uncertainty in which future will develop. Fredric Jameson
finds Gibson using culture as the determinant of change for the first time with this novel, rather than technology. Jameson focuses on the novel's "postmodern nominalism" that uses brand names to refresh old objects and experiences.
In post-structural literary theory
Cayce is compared with the main character, Oedipa Maas, of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
as detectives interpreting clues but with neither the character nor the reader knowing if there actually is a pattern to be found and, if there is one, whether it is real or conspiracy. Gibson's use of name-dropping brands to create a sense of "in-group style … of those in the know" is traced back to Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel V.
. Gibson's writing style is said to be similar to Raymond Chandler
's detective stories and Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers that used McGuffins (the identity of the maker of the footage, in this case) to drive the story. Gibson's social observations are influenced by the works of Naomi Klein
and Malcolm Gladwell
.
While markedly different from his previous writing, in that it is not set in an imaginary future with imaginary technologies, Pattern Recognition includes many of his previous elements, including impacts of technology shifts on society, Japanese computer experts and Russian mafia figures. In common with Gibson’s previous work, Paul Di Filippo
found the following in Pattern Recognition: "the close observation of the culture's bleeding edge
; an analysis of the ways technology molds our every moment; the contrasting of boardroom with street; the impossibility and dire necessity of making art in the face of instant co-optation; the damaged loner facing the powers-that-be, for both principle and profit".
. In the American market it peaked at number four on the New York Times Best Seller list
for hardcover fiction on February 23 and spent nine weeks on USA Today's Top 150 Best-Selling Books peaking at number 34. In the Canadian market, the novel peaked at number three on The Globe and Mail
's best seller list on February 15 in the hardcover fiction category. The novel was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award
and the British Science Fiction Association Award
.
Gibson's writing was positively received by science fiction writers Dennis Danvers
, Candas Jane Dorsey
, and Rudy Rucker
. Rucker has written: "[w]ith a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics" and Danvers wrote that "no sentence has a subject if it can do without one". One critic found the prose to be as "hard and compact as glacier ice" and another that it "gives us sharply observed small moments inscribed with crystalline clarity". Gibson's descriptions of interiors and of the built environments of Tokyo, Russia and London were singled out as impressive, and The Village Voice
s review remarked that "Gibson expertly replicates the biosphere of a discussion board: the coffee-shop intimacy, the fishbowl paranoia, the splintering factions, the inevitable flame war". Lisa Zeidner of The New York Times Book Review
elaborated:
, Hotmail
, iBook
, Netscape
, and G4
, the language of the novel was judged by one critic to be "awkward in its effort to appear "cool" " while other critics have found it overdone and feared it would quickly date the novel. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
review commented that the "constant, unadulterated "hipster-technocrat, cyber-MTV" lingo [is] overdone and inappropriate" On the technology, Cory Doctorow
found Gibson's use of watermarks
and keystroke logging
to be hollow and has noted that "Gibson is no technologist, he's an accomplished and insightful social critic ... and he treats these items from the real world as metaphor. But ... Gibson's metaphorical treatment of these technologies will date this very fine book".
Some critics found the plot to be a conventional "unravel-the-secret" and "woman on a quest" thriller. Toby Litt
wrote that "[j]udged just as a thriller, Pattern Recognition takes too long to kickstart, gives its big secrets away before it should and never puts the heroine in believable peril". The conclusion, called "unnecessarily pat" by one critic, was compared by Litt with the "ultimate fantasy ending of 1980s movies – the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has kept her integrity but still ended up filthy rich." The review in the Library Journal
called the novel a "melodrama of beset geekdom" that "may well reveal the emptiness at the core of Gibson's other fiction", but recommended it for all libraries due to the author's popularity.
_-_covers.jpg)
The hardcover edition, released in February 2003, was published by the Penguin Group imprint G. P. Putnam's Sons
. Berkley Books
published the trade paperback one year later, on February 3, 2004, and a mass market paperback in February 2005. In the UK the paperback was published by Penguin Books
a year after its Viking Press
imprint published the hardcover version. In 2004 it was published in French, Danish, Japanese, German, and Spanish. In 2005 the book was published in Russia. The translation made by Nikita Krasnikov was awarded as the best translation of the year.
Tantor Media published the 10.5-hour long, unabridged audiobook on April 1, 2004 and re-released it on January 1, 2005. Voiced by Shelly Frasier, it was criticized by John Adams
of Locus as being pleasant but with distracting dialects. The audiobook is available as a digital download from audible.com.
, in five 30-minute episodes in February and October 2007. Post-punk band Sonic Youth included a track called "Pattern Recognition" on their 2004 album Sonic Nurse
that opens with the lyric "I'm a cool hunter making you my way". A film adaptation was initiated in April 2004 with producer Steve Golin
's production company Anonymous Content and the studio Warner Bros. Pictures hiring director Peter Weir
. Screenwriters David Arata, D. B. Weiss
, and Weir co-wrote the screenplay but in May 2007, Gibson commented on his personal blog that he believed Weir would not be proceeding with the project. the Internet Movie Database
listed the film adaptation as "in active development" with a 2011 release date.
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...
writer William Gibson
William Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard
Cayce Pollard
Cayce Pollard is the fictional protagonist of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.- Personal history :Aged 32 during the events of the Pattern Recognition, Cayce lives in New York City. Though named by her parents after Edgar Cayce, she pronounces her given name "Case"...
, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols. The action takes place in London
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
, Tokyo
Tokyo
, ; officially , is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. Tokyo is the capital of Japan, the center of the Greater Tokyo Area, and the largest metropolitan area of Japan. It is the seat of the Japanese government and the Imperial Palace, and the home of the Japanese Imperial Family...
, and Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...
as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet.
The novel's central theme involves the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data. Other themes include methods of interpretation of history, cultural familiarity with brand names, and tensions between art and commercialization. The September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century. Critics identify influences in Pattern Recognition from Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
's postmodern detective story The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero...
.
Pattern Recognition is Gibson's eighth novel and his first one to be set in the contemporary world. Like his previous work, it has been classified as a science fiction and postmodern
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
novel, with the action unfolding along a thriller plot line. Critics approved of the writing but found the plot unoriginal and some of the language distracting. The book peaked at number four on the New York Times Best Seller list
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
, was nominated for the 2003 British Science Fiction Association Award
BSFA award
The BSFA Awards are literary awards presented annually since 1970 by the British Science Fiction Association to honor works in the genre of science fiction. Nominees and winners are chosen based on a vote of BSFA members...
, and was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award
Arthur C. Clarke Award
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. The award was established with a grant from Arthur C. Clarke and the first prize was awarded in 1987...
and Locus
Locus Award
The Locus Award is a literary award established in 1971 and presented to winners of Locus magazine's annual readers' poll. Currently, the Locus Awards are presented at an annual banquet...
Awards.
Background
Before writing Pattern Recognition, the author, William GibsonWilliam Gibson
William Gibson is an American-Canadian science fiction author.William Gibson may also refer to:-Association football:*Will Gibson , Scottish footballer...
, published seven novels (one co-written) and numerous short stories beginning in 1977. His previous novel, All Tomorrow's Parties
All Tomorrow's Parties (novel)
All Tomorrow's Parties is the final novel in William Gibson's Bridge trilogy. Like its predecessors, All Tomorrow's Parties is a speculative fiction novel set in a postmodern, dystopian, postcyberpunk future. The novel borrows its title from that of a song by Velvet Underground...
, was published in October 1999 as the conclusion of the Bridge trilogy
Bridge trilogy
The Bridge trilogy is a series of novels by William Gibson, his second after the successful Sprawl trilogy. The trilogy comprises the novels Virtual Light , Idoru, and All Tomorrow's Parties .-Setting:...
. Pattern Recognition was written between 2001 and 2002 while Gibson was living in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
and released in February 2003. Pattern Recognition was originally intended to be a stand alone novel, but afterwards Gibson wrote Spook Country
Spook Country
Spook Country is a 2007 novel by speculative fiction author William Gibson. A political thriller set in contemporary North America, it followed on from the author's previous novel, Pattern Recognition , and was succeeded in 2010 by Zero History, which featured much of its core cast of characters...
and Zero History
Zero History
Zero History is a novel by William Gibson. It concludes the informal trilogy begun by Pattern Recognition and features Hollis Henry and Milgrim from Spook Country, the middle book, as the protagonists.-Plot:...
which take place in the same universe and use some of the same characters.
Gibson traveled to Tokyo in 2001 to prepare for this new novel, which takes place in London, Moscow, and Tokyo. He did not travel to London or Moscow but used interviews with friends and internet resources for research. In September 2001 Gibson had written about 100 pages but was struggling to finish. He stopped writing after watching the September 11, 2001 attacks
September 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
on television and "realized [the novel] had become a story that took place in an alternate time track, in which Sept. 11 hadn't happened". He considered abandoning the novel but a few weeks later re-wrote portions to use the attacks as a motivating factor for the distress the main character feels. In a 2003 interview he said, "There I was, in the winter of 2001, with no idea what the summer of 2002 was going to be like. ... In the original post-9/11 draft, London felt more like London is feeling right now. Cayce keeps seeing trucks full of soldiers. But I took that out, because as it got closer to the time, it wasn't actually happening."
Plot summary
Advertising consultant Cayce PollardCayce Pollard
Cayce Pollard is the fictional protagonist of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.- Personal history :Aged 32 during the events of the Pattern Recognition, Cayce lives in New York City. Though named by her parents after Edgar Cayce, she pronounces her given name "Case"...
, who reacts to logos and advertising as if to an allergen
Allergen
An allergen is any substance that can cause an allergy. In technical terms, an allergen is a non-parasitic antigen capable of stimulating a type-I hypersensitivity reaction in atopic individuals....
, arrives in London in August 2002. She is working on a contract with the marketing firm Blue Ant to judge the effectiveness of a proposed corporate logo for a shoe company. During the presentation, graphic designer Dorotea Benedetti becomes hostile towards Cayce as she rejects the first proposal. After dinner with some Blue Ant employees, the company founder Hubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend
Hubertus Bigend is a fictional character appearing in the later novels of science fiction and literary author William Gibson. Bigend is the antihero of Gibson's Pattern Recognition , Spook Country and Zero History...
offers Cayce a new contract: to uncover who is responsible for distributing a series of anonymous, artistic film clips via the internet. Cayce had been following the film clips and participating in an online discussion forum theorizing on the clips’ meaning, setting, and other aspects. Wary of corrupting the artistic process and mystery of the clips, she reluctantly accepts.
A friend from the discussion group, who uses the handle Parkaboy, privately emails her saying a friend of a friend has discovered an encrypted watermark
Watermark (data file)
A watermark stored in a data file refers to a method for ensuring data integrity which combines aspects of data hashing and digital watermarking. Both are useful for tamper detection, though each has its own advantages and disadvantages.- Data hashing :...
on one clip. They concoct a fake persona, a young woman named Keiko, to seduce the Japanese man who knows the watermark code. Cayce, along with an American computer security specialist, Boone Chu, hired to assist her, travels to Tokyo to meet the man and retrieve the watermark code. Two men attempt to steal the code but Cayce escapes and travels back to London. Boone travels to Columbus, Ohio to investigate the company that he believes created the watermark. Meanwhile, Blue Ant hires Dorotea who reveals that she was previously employed by a Russian lawyer whose clients have been investigating Cayce. The clients wanted Cayce to refuse the job of tracking the film clips and it was Dorotea's responsibility to ensure this.
Through a completely random encounter Cayce meets Voytek Biroshak and Ngemi; the former an artist using old ZX81 microcomputers as a sculpture medium, the latter a collector of rare technology (he mentions purchasing Stephen King's word processor, for example). Another collector, and sometime 'friend' of Ngemi's, Hobbs Baranov, is a retired cryptographer and mathematician with connections in the American National Security Agency
National Security Agency
The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
. Cayce strikes a deal with him: she buys a Curta calculator
Curta calculator
The Curta is a small, hand-cranked mechanical calculator introduced in 1948. It has an extremely compact design: a small cylinder that fits in the palm of the hand. It can be used to perform addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and — with more difficulty — square roots and other...
for him and he finds the email address to which the watermark code was sent. Using this email address Cayce makes contact with Stella Volkova whose sister Nora is the maker of the film clips.
Cayce flies to Moscow to meet Stella in person and watch Nora work. Nora is brain damaged from an assassination attempt and can only express herself through film. At her hotel, Cayce is intercepted and drugged by Dorotea and wakes up in a mysterious prison facility. Cayce escapes; exhausted, disoriented and lost, she nearly collapses as Parkaboy, who upon Cayce's request was flown to Moscow, retrieves her and brings her to the prison where the film is processed. There Hubertus, Stella and Nora's uncle Andrei, and the latter's security employees are waiting for her. Over dinner with Cayce, the Russians reveal that they have been spying on her since she posted to a discussion forum speculating that the clips may be controlled by the Russian Mafia
Russian Mafia
The Russian Mafia is a name applied to organized crime syndicates in Russia and Ukraine. The mafia in various countries take the name of the country, as for example the Ukrainian mafia....
. They had let her track the clips to expose any security breaches in their distribution network. The Russians surrender all the information they had collected on her father’s disappearance and the book ends with Cayce coming to terms with his absence while in Paris with Parkaboy, whose real name is Peter Gilbert.
Characters
- Cayce PollardCayce PollardCayce Pollard is the fictional protagonist of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition.- Personal history :Aged 32 during the events of the Pattern Recognition, Cayce lives in New York City. Though named by her parents after Edgar Cayce, she pronounces her given name "Case"...
– A 32-year-old woman who lives in New York City. She pronounces her given name "Case" although her parents named her after Edgar CayceEdgar CayceEdgar Cayce was an American psychic who allegedly had the ability to give answers to questions on subjects such as healing or Atlantis while in a hypnotic trance...
. She uses her interest in marketing trends and fads, and her psychological sensitivity to logos and advertising, in her work as an advertising consultant. Her sensitivity becomes a phobia towards older corporate mascots, especially the Michelin Man. She wears only black, usually Fruit of the LoomFruit of the LoomFruit of the Loom is an American company which manufactures clothing, particularly underwear. The company's world headquarters is in Bowling Green, Kentucky. It is currently a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.-Company profile:...
shrunken cotton t-shirts (all tags removed) with Levis jeans (with the trademarks filed off the buttons) or skirts, tights, boots, as well as a Buzz Rickson MA-1 bomber jacketMA-1 bomber jacketThe MA-1 bomber jacket was first developed in the mid 1950s. The MA-1 and its predecessor, the B-15 Flight Jacket, were needed at that time because the emergence of the jet age created new requirements for pilot performance, safety and comfort.- History :Prior to the invention of jet aircraft,...
. - Hubertus BigendHubertus BigendHubertus Bigend is a fictional character appearing in the later novels of science fiction and literary author William Gibson. Bigend is the antihero of Gibson's Pattern Recognition , Spook Country and Zero History...
– The 35-year-old founder of advertising agency Blue Ant. He was born in Belgium but educated at a British boarding schoolBoarding schoolA boarding school is a school where some or all pupils study and live during the school year with their fellow students and possibly teachers and/or administrators. The word 'boarding' is used in the sense of "bed and board," i.e., lodging and meals...
and at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
. - Dorotea Benedetti – The representative of the graphic designGraphic designGraphic design is a creative process – most often involving a client and a designer and usually completed in conjunction with producers of form – undertaken in order to convey a specific message to a targeted audience...
company. She has a background in industrial espionageIndustrial espionageIndustrial espionage, economic espionage or corporate espionage is a form of espionage conducted for commercial purposes instead of purely national security purposes...
and is secretly hired to encourage Cayce to leave London without accepting Bigend's offer to track the film clips. - Bernard Stonestreet – A representative of the advertising agency Blue Ant.
- "Parkaboy"/Peter Gilbert – Cayce's friend from the online discussion forum. He lives in ChicagoChicagoChicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...
and describes himself as a "middle-aged white guy since 1967". - Boone Chu – A Chinese-American living in Washington State, but raised in OklahomaOklahomaOklahoma is a state located in the South Central region of the United States of America. With an estimated 3,751,351 residents as of the 2010 census and a land area of 68,667 square miles , Oklahoma is the 28th most populous and 20th-largest state...
. He had a failed start-up company specializing in security. He is hired to assist Cayce in the search for the maker of the footage. - Voytek Biroshak – A blind man born in PolandPolandPoland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
and raised in RussiaRussiaRussia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
. He acquires and sells antique calculators to raise funds for an exhibition on Sinclair ZX81Sinclair ZX81The ZX81 was a home computer produced by Sinclair Research and manufactured in Scotland by Timex Corporation. It was launched in the United Kingdom in March 1981 as the successor to Sinclair's ZX80 and was designed to be a low-cost introduction to home computing for the general public...
computers. - Damien Pease – A 30-year-old friend of Cayce whose flat she stays at while in London. He is a video director shooting a documentary on WWII battlegroundWorld War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
excavation near Stalingrad. - Hobbs Baranov – A former NSANational Security AgencyThe National Security Agency/Central Security Service is a cryptologic intelligence agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the collection and analysis of foreign communications and foreign signals intelligence, as well as protecting U.S...
cryptographerCryptographyCryptography is the practice and study of techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties...
and mathematicianMathematicianA mathematician is a person whose primary area of study is the field of mathematics. Mathematicians are concerned with quantity, structure, space, and change....
. He collects antique calculators and sells intelligenceIntelligence (information gathering)Intelligence assessment is the development of forecasts of behaviour or recommended courses of action to the leadership of an organization, based on a wide range of available information sources both overt and covert. Assessments are developed in response to requirements declared by the leadership...
as he squats near PoolePoolePoole is a large coastal town and seaport in the county of Dorset, on the south coast of England. The town is east of Dorchester, and Bournemouth adjoins Poole to the east. The Borough of Poole was made a unitary authority in 1997, gaining administrative independence from Dorset County Council...
with a Gypsy group. - Ivy – Creator of website, discussion group, and chatroom Fetish:Footage:Forum that Cayce frequents. The website's intention is to discuss the anonymous film postings.
Style and story elements
The novel uses a third-person narrative in the present tense with a somber tone reminiscent of a "low-level post-apocalypticism". Cayce's memories of the September 11, 2001 attacksSeptember 11, 2001 attacks
The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks The September 11 attacks (also referred to as September 11, September 11th or 9/119/11 is pronounced "nine eleven". The slash is not part of the pronunciation...
, which briefly use the future tense, are told by Gibson as "a Benjaminian
Walter Benjamin
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German-Jewish intellectual, who functioned variously as a literary critic, philosopher, sociologist, translator, radio broadcaster and essayist...
seed of time", as one reviewer calls it, because of the monistic and lyrical descriptions of Cayce's relationship to objects with the attacks in the background. Two neologisms appear in the novel: gender-bait and mirror-world. Gibson created the term mirror-world to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets. Gender-bait refers to a male posing as a female online to elicit positive responses. The term coolhunter
Coolhunting
Coolhunting is a term coined in the early 1990s referring to a new breed of marketing professionals, called coolhunters. It is their job to make observations and predictions in changes of new or existing cultural trends...
, not coined by Gibson but used in the marketing industry for several years, is used to describe Cayce's profession of identifying the roots of emerging trends.
The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a motif
Motif (narrative)
In narrative, a motif is any recurring element that has symbolic significance in a story. Through its repetition, a motif can help produce other narrative aspects such as theme or mood....
representing a break with the past with Cayce's father, who disappears during the attacks, as the personification of the 20th century. Gibson viewed the attacks as a nodal point after which "nothing is really the same". One reviewer commented that in "Gibson's view, 9-11 was the end of history; after it we are without a history, careening toward an unknown future without the benefit of a past—our lives before 9-11 are now irrelevant." Cayce's search for her father and Damien's excavation of the German bomber symbolize the historicist search for a method to interpret people’s actions in the past. Coming to terms with her father’s disappearance may be interpreted as a requiem for those lost to the 20th century, something that may have been influenced by Gibson coming to terms with the loss of his own father.
The film clips are a motif used to enhance the theme of the desire to find meaning or detect patterns. They are released over the internet and gain a cult following, in the same way that the lonelygirl15
Lonelygirl15
lonelygirl15 was an interactive web-based video series which began in June 2006 and ran through to August 1, 2008. Developed under the working title The Children of Anchor Cove, the show gained worldwide media attention when it was outed as fictional in September 2006.-Overview:lonelygirl15...
videoblog gained an international following in 2006. Corporate interest in the footage is aroused by its originality and global distribution methods. The characters debate whether the anonymous clips are part of a complete narrative or a work in progress, and when or where they were shot. This enigmatic nature of the footage is said to metaphorically represent the nature of the confusing and uncertain post-9/11 future. The author Dennis Danvers
Dennis Danvers
Dennis Danvers is an American author of science fiction novels. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia. He is the president of the Byrd Park Civic League.-Novels:...
has remarked that the footage being edited down to a single frame is like the world compressed into a single novel. The footage, released freely to a global audience with a lack of time or place indicators, has also been contrasted to Pattern Recognition written under contract for a large corporation and which uses liminal name-dropping that definitively sets it in London, Tokyo, and Moscow in 2002.
Pattern recognition
The central theme throughout the novel involves the natural human propensity to search for meaningMeaning (non-linguistic)
A non-linguistic meaning is an actual or possible derivation from sentience, which is not associated with signs that have any original or primary intent of communication...
with the constant risk of apophenia
Apophenia
Apophenia is the experience of seeing meaningful patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.The term was coined in 1958 by Klaus Conrad, who defined it as the "unmotivated seeing of connections" accompanied by a "specific experience of an abnormal meaningfulness", but it has come to...
. Followers of the seemingly random clips seek connections and meaningfulness in them but are revealed to be victims of apophenia as the clips are just edited surveillance camera footage. Likewise, Cayce's mother turns to investigating electronic voice phenomena
Electronic voice phenomenon
Electronic voice phenomena are electronically generated noises that resemble speech, but are not the result of intentional voice recordings or renderings. Common sources of EVP include static, stray radio transmissions, and background noise...
after Cayce's father disappears. Science fiction critic Thomas Wagner underscores the desire for meaning, or pattern recognition
Pattern recognition
In machine learning, pattern recognition is the assignment of some sort of output value to a given input value , according to some specific algorithm. An example of pattern recognition is classification, which attempts to assign each input value to one of a given set of classes...
, using a comparison between the film clips and Cayce's search for her father after the attacks:
[T]he very randomness and ineffability of the clips flies in the face of our natural human tendency towards pattern recognition ... [T]he subculture that surrounds "following the footage" ... [is] an effective plot device for underscoring the novel's post-9/11 themes: to wit, the uncertainty of the fabric of day-to-day life people began to feel following that event … [We] as people don't like uncertainty, don't like knowing that there's something we can't comprehend. And if we can't fit something into an existing pattern, then by golly we'll come up with one.Within the marketing world, Cayce is portrayed not as an outside rebel, but rather a paragon of the system. Inescapably within the system, she seeks an epistemological perspective
Epistemological realism
Epistemological realism is a philosophical position, a subcategory of objectivism, holding that what you know about an object exists independently of your mind. It opposes epistemological idealism....
to objectively interpret patterns. The review in The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
calls this search "a survival tactic within the context of no context—dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning".
Memory of history
Using 20th-century relics, such as a Curta calculator, an excavated StukaJunkers Ju 87
The Junkers Ju 87 or Stuka was a two-man German ground-attack aircraft...
, Hobbs Baranov, and Voytek's planned ZX81 show, Gibson raises the question of how a contemporary society views past societies. Gibson portrays the past century as dominated by conflict, suspicion, and espionage. Following the disappearance of Cayce's father, a designer of embassy security systems, on September 11, 2001, Cayce is left feeling "ungrieved" until she reviews footage and records of that day tracking his movements until he vanishes.
Following this line of thought Gibson raises the question of how the future will view today's society. The novel "adopts a postmodern historicism
Historicism
Historicism is a mode of thinking that assigns a central and basic significance to a specific context, such as historical period, geographical place and local culture. As such it is in contrast to individualist theories of knowledges such as empiricism and rationalism, which neglect the role of...
" perspective, through the arguments presented by Bigend, Cayce, and Parkaboy. Bigend and Cayce's view of history are compared to those of philosopher Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce
Benedetto Croce was an Italian idealist philosopher, and occasionally also politician. He wrote on numerous topics, including philosophy, history, methodology of history writing and aesthetics, and was a prominent liberal, although he opposed laissez-faire free trade...
in that they believe history is open for interpretation when re-written from the frame of reference of another society. Parkaboy rejects this view, believing that history can be an exact science.
Originality and monoculture
The book explores a tension between originality and monoculture by focusing on the artist's relationship with a commercialized world and its marketing of free art and consumer products. Critic Lisa Zeidner argues that the artist's "loyalty and love" involved with creating originality counters Bigend’s assertion that everything is a reflection of something else and that the creative process no longer rests with the individual. Commercialism is portrayed as a monoculture that assimilates originality. The Tommy Hilfiger brand is used as an example, "simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A dilute tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Savile Row ... There must be some Tommy Hilfiger event horizonEvent horizon
In general relativity, an event horizon is a boundary in spacetime beyond which events cannot affect an outside observer. In layman's terms it is defined as "the point of no return" i.e. the point at which the gravitational pull becomes so great as to make escape impossible. The most common case...
, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."
One critic points out that the marketing agency Blue Ant is named after the wasp Blue Ant
Blue ant
The blue ant is, despite its name and its appearance, not an ant at all, but rather a species of large solitary parasitic wasp sometimes known as a flower wasp. It is a native of south and southeast Australia, including the Australian states of Tasmania, New South Wales, Victoria and South...
: "it's a wasp with a painful sting. The female hunts for a ground-dwelling cricket. She paralyses it with a sting and lays her egg on it. The still living yet immobile cricket becomes food for the wasp's young. What a clever metaphor for the process of targeting, commodifying, and marketing cool." On the other hand, as Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of...
notes, while new art is constantly threatened by commodification, it is dependent on the monoculture for its launching point and uniqueness. Gibson's product positioning language and Cayce's analysis of consumerist trends show that society is not a victim of consumerism, but rather its creator who helps shape it without ever stepping outside it. Alex Link argues that rather than a simple attack on consumerism outright, the novel outlines a complex interrelationship between art, brand design, and terrorism as varying attitudes to history, terror, and community.
Branding, identity, and globalization
The novel’s language is viewed as rife with labeling and product placements. Postmodern theorist Fredric JamesonFredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
calls it "a kind of hyped-up name-dropping ... [where] an encyclopaedic familiarity with the fashions ... [creates] class status as a matter of knowing the score rather than of having money and power". He also calls it "postmodern nominalism" in that the names express the new and fashionable. This name-dropping demonstrates how commercialism has created and named new objects and experiences and re-named (or re-created) some that already existed. This naming includes nationalities; there are eight references to nationality (or locality) in the first three pages. Zeidner wrote that the novel's "new century is unsettlingly transitional making it difficult to maintain an individual identity". One character argues that "there will soon be no national identity left … [as] all experience [will be] reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing." This is juxtaposed against the footage that contains no hints of time period or location. Globalization is represented by characters of varying nationalities, ease of international travel, portable instant communication, and commercial monoculture recognizable across international markets. As an example, Gibson writes how one ‘yes or no’ decision by Cayce on the logo will impact the lives of the people in remote places who will manufacture the logos and how it will infect their dreams.
Genre
While some reviewers regard the novel as a thriller, others see it as an example of post-millennial science fiction with stories set in the "technocultural future-present". Some reviewers note that the novel furthers the post-millennial trend in science fiction of illustrating society's inability to imagine a definitive future and the use of technologies once considered advanced or academic now commonplace within society and its vernacular. Gibson said that the only science fiction elements are "[t]he Footage and Cayce's special talents" but that he "never bought that conceit that science fiction is about the future". Dennis DanversDennis Danvers
Dennis Danvers is an American author of science fiction novels. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia. He is the president of the Byrd Park Civic League.-Novels:...
explained the use of science fiction as a narrative strategy:
[s]cience fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well, without resorting to magic or the supernatural, where the fantasy folks work. A realist wrestling with the woes of the middle class can leave the world out of it by and large except for an occasional swipe at the shallowness of suburbia. A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it's the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson's point ... is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we're all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the "real world" now has to answer the question, "Which one?"
These elements, and the use of the September 11, 2001 attacks as a breaking point from the past, led academics to label it a postmodern novel
Postmodern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain characteristics of post–World War II literature and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature.Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is hard to define and there is little agreement on the exact...
. The attacks mark the point where the 'modern', that is the 20th-century certainty in society's advancement towards a better future, changed to the 'postmodern', that is the 21st-century uncertainty in which future will develop. Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson
Fredric Jameson is an American literary critic and Marxist political theorist. He is best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends—he once described postmodernism as the spatialization of culture under the pressure of organized capitalism...
finds Gibson using culture as the determinant of change for the first time with this novel, rather than technology. Jameson focuses on the novel's "postmodern nominalism" that uses brand names to refresh old objects and experiences.
In post-structural literary theory
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
Cayce is compared with the main character, Oedipa Maas, of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49 is a novel by Thomas Pynchon, first published in 1966. The shortest of Pynchon's novels, it is about a woman, Oedipa Maas, possibly unearthing the centuries-old conflict between two mail distribution companies, Thurn und Taxis and the Trystero...
as detectives interpreting clues but with neither the character nor the reader knowing if there actually is a pattern to be found and, if there is one, whether it is real or conspiracy. Gibson's use of name-dropping brands to create a sense of "in-group style … of those in the know" is traced back to Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel V.
V.
V. is the debut novel of Thomas Pynchon, published in 1963. It describes the exploits of a discharged U.S. Navy sailor named Benny Profane, his reconnection in New York with a group of pseudo-bohemian artists and hangers-on known as the Whole Sick Crew, and the quest of an aging traveller named...
. Gibson's writing style is said to be similar to Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Thornton Chandler was an American novelist and screenwriter.In 1932, at age forty-five, Raymond Chandler decided to become a detective fiction writer after losing his job as an oil company executive during the Depression. His first short story, "Blackmailers Don't Shoot", was published in...
's detective stories and Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers that used McGuffins (the identity of the maker of the footage, in this case) to drive the story. Gibson's social observations are influenced by the works of Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein
Naomi Klein is a Canadian author and social activist known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization.-Family:...
and Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell, CM is a Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker. He is currently based in New York City and has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996...
.
While markedly different from his previous writing, in that it is not set in an imaginary future with imaginary technologies, Pattern Recognition includes many of his previous elements, including impacts of technology shifts on society, Japanese computer experts and Russian mafia figures. In common with Gibson’s previous work, Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo
Paul Di Filippo is an American science fiction writer. He has been published in Postscripts...
found the following in Pattern Recognition: "the close observation of the culture's bleeding edge
Bleeding edge
Bleeding edge technology is technology that is so new that it could have a high risk of being unreliable and may incur greater expense in order to use it...
; an analysis of the ways technology molds our every moment; the contrasting of boardroom with street; the impossibility and dire necessity of making art in the face of instant co-optation; the damaged loner facing the powers-that-be, for both principle and profit".
Reception
Pattern Recognition was released on February 3, 2003 as Gibson launched a 15-city tour. The novel was featured on the January 19 cover of The New York Times Book ReviewThe New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
. In the American market it peaked at number four on the New York Times Best Seller list
New York Times Best Seller list
The New York Times Best Seller list is widely considered the preeminent list of best-selling books in the United States. It is published weekly in The New York Times Book Review magazine, which is published in the Sunday edition of The New York Times and as a stand-alone publication...
for hardcover fiction on February 23 and spent nine weeks on USA Today's Top 150 Best-Selling Books peaking at number 34. In the Canadian market, the novel peaked at number three on The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail
The Globe and Mail is a nationally distributed Canadian newspaper, based in Toronto and printed in six cities across the country. With a weekly readership of approximately 1 million, it is Canada's largest-circulation national newspaper and second-largest daily newspaper after the Toronto Star...
's best seller list on February 15 in the hardcover fiction category. The novel was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award
Arthur C. Clarke Award
The Arthur C. Clarke Award is a British award given for the best science fiction novel first published in the United Kingdom during the previous year. The award was established with a grant from Arthur C. Clarke and the first prize was awarded in 1987...
and the British Science Fiction Association Award
BSFA award
The BSFA Awards are literary awards presented annually since 1970 by the British Science Fiction Association to honor works in the genre of science fiction. Nominees and winners are chosen based on a vote of BSFA members...
.
Gibson's writing was positively received by science fiction writers Dennis Danvers
Dennis Danvers
Dennis Danvers is an American author of science fiction novels. He currently lives in Richmond, Virginia. He is the president of the Byrd Park Civic League.-Novels:...
, Candas Jane Dorsey
Candas Jane Dorsey
Candas Jane Dorsey is a Canadian poet and science fiction novelist.Born and still living in Edmonton, Alberta, Dorsey became a writer from an early age, and a freelance writer since 1980. She writes across genre boundaries, writing poetry, fiction, mainstream and speculative, short and long form,...
, and Rudy Rucker
Rudy Rucker
Rudolf von Bitter Rucker is an American mathematician, computer scientist, science fiction author, and philosopher, and is one of the founders of the cyberpunk literary movement. The author of both fiction and non-fiction, he is best known for the novels in the Ware Tetralogy, the first two of...
. Rucker has written: "[w]ith a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics" and Danvers wrote that "no sentence has a subject if it can do without one". One critic found the prose to be as "hard and compact as glacier ice" and another that it "gives us sharply observed small moments inscribed with crystalline clarity". Gibson's descriptions of interiors and of the built environments of Tokyo, Russia and London were singled out as impressive, and The Village Voice
The Village Voice
The Village Voice is a free weekly newspaper and news and features website in New York City that features investigative articles, analysis of current affairs and culture, arts and music coverage, and events listings for New York City...
s review remarked that "Gibson expertly replicates the biosphere of a discussion board: the coffee-shop intimacy, the fishbowl paranoia, the splintering factions, the inevitable flame war". Lisa Zeidner of The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review
The New York Times Book Review is a weekly paper-magazine supplement to The New York Times in which current non-fiction and fiction books are reviewed. It is one of the most influential and widely read book review publications in the industry. The offices are located near Times Square in New York...
elaborated:
As usual, Gibson's prose is ... corpuscular, crenelated. His sentences slide from silk to steel, and take tonal joy rides from the ironic to the earnest. But he never gets lost in the language, as he sometimes has in the past. Structurally, this may be his most confident novel. The secondary characters and their subplots are more fully developed, right down to their personal e-mail styles. Without any metafictional grandstanding, Gibson nails the texture of Internet culture: how it feels to be close to someone you know only as a voice in a chat room, or to fret about someone spying on your browser's list of sites visited.Filled with name-dropping of businesses and products, such as MUJI
MUJI
, or is a Japanese retail company which sells a wide variety of household and consumer goods.Muji is distinguished by its design minimalism, emphasis on recycling, avoidance of waste in production and packaging, and no-logo or "no-brand" policy....
, Hotmail
Hotmail
Windows Live Hotmail, formerly known as MSN Hotmail and commonly referred to simply as Hotmail, is a free web-based email service operated by Microsoft as part of its Windows Live group. It was founded by Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith and launched in July 1996 as "HoTMaiL". It was one of the first...
, iBook
IBook
The iBook was a line of laptop computers sold by Apple Computer from 1999 to 2006. The line targeted the consumer and education markets, with lower specifications and prices than the PowerBook, Apple's higher-end line of laptop computers....
, Netscape
Netscape (web browser)
Netscape 7 was a series of proprietary cross-platform Internet suites created by Netscape Communications Corporation and then in-house by AOL to continue the Netscape series after Netscape 6. There were three main editions released from the Netscape 7 series; being Netscape 7.0, 7.1 and 7.2...
, and G4
Power Mac G4
The Power Mac G4 was a series of personal computers that was designed, manufactured, and sold by Apple between 1999 and 2004. They used the PowerPC G4 series of microprocessors. They were heralded by Apple to be the first personal supercomputers, reaching speeds of 4 to 20 Gigaflops...
, the language of the novel was judged by one critic to be "awkward in its effort to appear "cool" " while other critics have found it overdone and feared it would quickly date the novel. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also known simply as the "PG," is the largest daily newspaper serving metropolitan Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.-Early history:...
review commented that the "constant, unadulterated "hipster-technocrat, cyber-MTV" lingo [is] overdone and inappropriate" On the technology, Cory Doctorow
Cory Doctorow
Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licences for his books...
found Gibson's use of watermarks
Watermark (data file)
A watermark stored in a data file refers to a method for ensuring data integrity which combines aspects of data hashing and digital watermarking. Both are useful for tamper detection, though each has its own advantages and disadvantages.- Data hashing :...
and keystroke logging
Keystroke logging
Keystroke logging is the action of tracking the keys struck on a keyboard, typically in a covert manner so that the person using the keyboard is unaware that their actions are being monitored...
to be hollow and has noted that "Gibson is no technologist, he's an accomplished and insightful social critic ... and he treats these items from the real world as metaphor. But ... Gibson's metaphorical treatment of these technologies will date this very fine book".
Some critics found the plot to be a conventional "unravel-the-secret" and "woman on a quest" thriller. Toby Litt
Toby Litt
Toby Litt is an English writer, born in Bedford in 1968. He studied at Bedford Modern School, read English at Worcester College, Oxford and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury....
wrote that "[j]udged just as a thriller, Pattern Recognition takes too long to kickstart, gives its big secrets away before it should and never puts the heroine in believable peril". The conclusion, called "unnecessarily pat" by one critic, was compared by Litt with the "ultimate fantasy ending of 1980s movies – the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has kept her integrity but still ended up filthy rich." The review in the Library Journal
Library Journal
Library Journal is a trade publication for librarians. It was founded in 1876 by Melvil Dewey . It reports news about the library world, emphasizing public libraries, and offers feature articles about aspects of professional practice...
called the novel a "melodrama of beset geekdom" that "may well reveal the emptiness at the core of Gibson's other fiction", but recommended it for all libraries due to the author's popularity.
Publication history
G. P. Putnam's Sons
G. P. Putnam's Sons was a major United States book publisher based in New York City, New York. Since 1996, it has been an imprint of the Penguin Group.-History:...
. Berkley Books
Berkley Books
Berkley Books is an imprint of Penguin Group that began as an independent company in 1955. It was established by Charles Byrne and Frederic Klein, who were working for Avon and formed "Chic News Company". They renamed it Berkley Publishing Co. in 1955. They soon found a niche in science fiction...
published the trade paperback one year later, on February 3, 2004, and a mass market paperback in February 2005. In the UK the paperback was published by Penguin Books
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
a year after its Viking Press
Viking Press
Viking Press is an American publishing company owned by the Penguin Group, which has owned the company since 1975. It was founded in New York City on March 1, 1925, by Harold K. Guinzburg and George S. Oppenheim...
imprint published the hardcover version. In 2004 it was published in French, Danish, Japanese, German, and Spanish. In 2005 the book was published in Russia. The translation made by Nikita Krasnikov was awarded as the best translation of the year.
Tantor Media published the 10.5-hour long, unabridged audiobook on April 1, 2004 and re-released it on January 1, 2005. Voiced by Shelly Frasier, it was criticized by John Adams
John Joseph Adams
John Joseph Adams is an American science fiction and fantasy editor and critic. He is the editor of the anthologies Federations , The Living Dead , The Living Dead 2 , Seeds of Change , Wastelands: Stories of the Apocalypse John Joseph Adams (born 1976) is an American science fiction and fantasy...
of Locus as being pleasant but with distracting dialects. The audiobook is available as a digital download from audible.com.
Adaptations
The digital radio station BBC 7 broadcast (now BBC Radio 4 Extra) an abridged version of the novel, voiced by Lorelei KingLorelei King
Lorelei King is a United States-born actress who has been based in the United Kingdom since 1981. She has narrated audiobooks, acted in radio plays for BBC Radio 4 and appeared on television.- Early life :...
, in five 30-minute episodes in February and October 2007. Post-punk band Sonic Youth included a track called "Pattern Recognition" on their 2004 album Sonic Nurse
Sonic Nurse
Sonic Nurse is the 13th album by Sonic Youth, released on June 7, 2004. The cover art was made by renowned artist Richard Prince from his Nurse Paintings series...
that opens with the lyric "I'm a cool hunter making you my way". A film adaptation was initiated in April 2004 with producer Steve Golin
Steve Golin
Steve Golin is the founder and CEO of Anonymous Content LLP, a multimedia development, production and talent management company and co-founder and former CEO of Propaganda Films.-Propaganda Films:...
's production company Anonymous Content and the studio Warner Bros. Pictures hiring director Peter Weir
Peter Weir
Peter Lindsay Weir, AM is an Australian film director. After playing a leading role in the Australian New Wave cinema with his films such as Picnic at Hanging Rock, The Last Wave and Gallipoli, Weir directed a diverse group of American and international films—many of them major box office...
. Screenwriters David Arata, D. B. Weiss
D. B. Weiss
Daniel B. Weiss is an American author. His debut novel Lucky Wander Boy was themed around video games and has since been linked with the screen adaptations of various science-fiction and fantasy stories...
, and Weir co-wrote the screenplay but in May 2007, Gibson commented on his personal blog that he believed Weir would not be proceeding with the project. the Internet Movie Database
Internet Movie Database
Internet Movie Database is an online database of information related to movies, television shows, actors, production crew personnel, video games and fictional characters featured in visual entertainment media. It is one of the most popular online entertainment destinations, with over 100 million...
listed the film adaptation as "in active development" with a 2011 release date.
External links
- William Gibson Books: Pattern Recognition; author's site
- PR-Otaku: Logging and annotating William Gibson's Pattern Recognition
- Buzz Rickson “Pattern Recognition” Black MA-1 Intermediate Flying Jacket
- Audio interview at CBC Bookclub – Pattern Recognition (1hr) from 2003: part one runs 16 min; part two runs 9 min; part three runs 17 min; part four runs 9 min
- Pattern Recognition at Worlds Without End