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.
Definitely the most accessible Gibson novel written up to this point in his bibliography - it lacks the complex density of Neuromancer and is pretty rooted in the here-and-now. Also unlike his previous novels, Pattern Recognition only follows one protagonist, Cayce Pollard, instead of jumping between several entwining storylines.
Gibson's portrayal of internet groups and internet friendships feels very authentic, especially when compared with fellow sci-fi author Cory Doctorow's. The mysterious footage clips in the novel remind me of a recent similar event from real life (see: iamamiwhoami).
The only downside is the ending, which feels fuzzy despite being completely forthcoming about the book's mysteries. But as I think about it, Gibson's endings are all pretty identical, aren't they?
Reading updates
-
Started reading
-
26 April, 2010:
Finished reading
-
26 April, 2010:
Reviewed