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


From Publishers Weekly
Gibson, known as the "patron saint of cyberpunk lit," has made his reputation with futuristic tales. Though his new novel is set in the present, baroque descriptions of everyday articles and menacing anthropomorphic treatment of the Internet and sister technology give it a sci-fi feel. Cayce Pollard, a market researcher with razor-sharp intuition, makes big bucks by evaluating potential products and advertising campaigns. In London, she stays in the trendy digs of documentary filmmaker friend Damien (away on assignment), whom she e-mails frequently. When Cayce brusquely rejects the new logo of advertising mogul Hubertus Bigend, she earns his respect and a big check but makes an enemy of his graphic designer, vindictive Dorotea Benedetti. Hubertus later hires Cayce to ferret out the origin of a series of sensual film clips appearing guerrilla style on computers all over the world and attracting a growing cult following. Cayce treats this as a standard job until somebody breaks into Damien's flat and hacks into her computer. Suddenly every casual encounter carries undertones of danger. Her investigative trail takes her to Tokyo and Russia and through a rogue's gallery of iconoclastic Web-heads. Casting a further shadow is the memory of her father, Win, a security expert (probably CIA) missing and presumed dead in the World Trade Center disaster of exactly a year earlier. For complicated reasons even she doesn't understand, she connects her current dilemma with her father's tragedy and follows the trail with the fervor of a personal vendetta. Gibson's brisk, kinetic style and incisive observations should keep the reader entertained even when Cayce's quest begins to lose urgency. Gibson's best book since Mona Lisa Overdrive should satisfy his hardcore fans while winning plenty of new ones.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Adult/High School-Cayce Pollard is a well-paid professional marketer. She and her friends-filmmakers, dealers in electronic esoterica, designers, and hackers-live on the cutting edge of a highly technological, "post-geographic" world, where the manipulation of cultural trends can bring great power. When she is employed to discover the source of "the Footage," a mysterious film that has been appearing in bits and pieces on the Web and gathering a worldwide underground following, her survival is at stake. In her search for the auteur, she outwits corporate spies, terrorists, and mobsters in London, Tokyo, Moscow, and New York; struggles with ethical issues; and even delves into the mystery of her father's disappearance on September 11, 2001. Some readers might feel that this novel demands too much of them-the prose is witty, each page challenges with provocative observations, and there are a lot of pieces to the puzzle. But those who enjoyed Gibson's earlier work, or the writing of Neal Stephenson or Bruce Sterling, should relish this headlong race through an unsettling but recognizable world to a surprisingly humane conclusion.Christine C. Menefee, Fairfax County Public Library, Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Booklist
A precursor to Colin Laney, the "netrunner" of Gibson's sf novels, Idoru (1996) and All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), Cayce (pronounced "Case") Pollard is a coolhunter, "a 'sensitive' of some kind, a dowser in the world of global marketing," able to recognize trends (i.e., patterns) before anyone else--only she operates in the post-9/11 world of today. Hired by the rich and toothsome Hubertus Bigend to pass judgment on a new logo for a popular footwear product, a jetlagged Pollard finds herself in London on business. A self-proclaimed footagehead, named for the group of hobbyists obsessed with the mysterious release of segments of footage on the Internet, Pollard is subsequently hired by Bigend to use her talents to uncover the source of the footage, a job that ultimately sends her to meet a socially inept hacker in Tokyo, a creepy former NSA agent in Bournemouth, and, inevitably, gets her involved with the Russian Mafia and the new oligarchs in Moscow. Pollard's acute talents are compromised by her grief over the recent disappearance of her father, an ex-security agent, missing since 9/11, and her "trademark phobias" (she is allergic to Tommy Hilfiger and the Michelin Man). Gibson's usual themes are still intact--globalism, constant surveillance, paranoia, and pattern recognition--only with the added presence of real-world elements (pilates, Google, Bibendum, Echelon, Buzz Rickson's). With incredibly evocative prose, Gibson masterfully captures the essence of a specific time and place and the often chaotic sense of disorientation experienced while globe hopping ("soul delay," as Pollard calls it, referring to the time it takes for the soul to catch up to the body). Gibson fans will not be disappointed. Benjamin Segedin
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
In the first sentence of his first novel, William Gibson penned one of the most memorable lines in the last quarter century of science fiction or, indeed, any literature: ￯﾿ﾽThe sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.￯﾿ﾽ Gibson invented cyberspace, envisioned the ￯﾿ﾽmatrix.￯﾿ﾽ Imagine what he could do with the present.

Well, imagine no more. Pattern Recognition is a wild ride through a world of Hotmail accounts, Tommy Hilfiger displays, Pilates studios: our world. Your protagonist: Cayce Pollard, whose talent consists of a truly extraordinary allergy to brands, trademarks, and fashion. Which, inevitably, makes her invaluable to marketers everywhere on earth.

But this assignment￯﾿ﾽthis one doesn￯﾿ﾽt merely involve reacting to a logo design. This one is a sprawling mystery. Where do those odd video posts to the Internet come from? Why do they inspire such fanatic loyalty? And who is it that really wants to know -- enough to break into Cayce's apartment, hack her computer, threaten her life?

Walk away? Cayce Pollard has her father￯﾿ﾽs stubbornness: a former intelligence agent, he was last seen in a taxi headed toward the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001...

This is a story we couldn￯﾿ﾽt stop reading and can￯﾿ﾽt forget. Bill Camarda

Bill Camarda is a consultant, writer, and web/multimedia content developer. His 15 books include Special Edition Using Word 2000 and Upgrading & Fixing Networks For Dummies®, Second Edition.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The accolades and acclaim are endless for William Gibson's coast-to-coast bestseller. Set in the post-9/11 present, Pattern Recognition is the story of one woman's never-ending search for the now.

FROM THE CRITICS

Chicago Tribune

It turns out that William Gibson knows as much about the present as he does about the future....Now, in his first book set in the preset, Gibson turns loose the full power of his laser eyes and his non-judgmental but awesomely encompassing heart on an exciting thriller that is basically a modern fable, a quest for hints on how to live now....It's a masterful performance from a major novelist who seems to be just now hitting his peak. Welcome to the present, Mr. Gibson

Washington Post

..overall, Gibson has delivered what is assuredly one of the first authentic and vital novels of the 21st century, placing himself alongside Haruki Murakami as a writer who can conjure the numinous out of the quotidian.

San Francisco Chronicle

...The completely contemporary "Pattern Recognition" finds the author rejuvenated, ready to acknowledge that the world has become a stranger place than could have been imagined even 15 years ago. It's his best book in a long time, and perhaps his most accessible one ever!

The Village Voice

Pattern recognition, Gibson makes clear, is not just the coolhunter's job description but a survival tactic within the context of no context -- dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning, as our accelerating now leaves us ever further behind.

The New Yorker