The Footage Shall Reveal...

Pattern Recognition - William Gibson

The generation born in the 1970s and '80s has benefited from a revolution in the way our world functions; a sea change of the magnitude of steam power, Ford's assembly line, or the refutation of the heliocentric universe. Never before has information spread at such velocity. Consider "dancing baby" and "all your base are belong to us," phenomena that circumnavigated the globe at the speed of thought. To our grandparents, fashion and commerce were local: the corner bakery, the town tailor and milliner, a grocer served by local farms and gardens. Today, however, children the world over identify the icons of our age regardless of their native alphabet; they recognize the swoosh and the golden arches and the red and white soda can at a distance of a thousand paces.

Of course, such revolution also exposes our lives to its more unpleasant aspects: the irritating – spam – or the malicious – catfishing and Russian bots. We've already witnessed instantaneous phenomena such as flash mobs (predicted in the 1960s by scifi writer Larry Niven) that evolve from instantaneous communication, or art forms hitherto unknown and perhaps unimaginable. If a sinister combination of amorality and entrepreneurial spirit can twist the information revolution to its own uses, what then will happen to such new art forms? Who better than William Gibson to research that question?
Meet Cayce Pollard. She's allergic to trademarks: a rack of Tommy Hilfiger will give her hives; a chance glimpse of the Michelin Man will cause a panic attack. In addition to, or perhaps because of, her malady, Cayce has a strange ability. She can spot trends in fashion and lifestyle before they even happen, a strange form of Pattern Recognition her clients call "coolhunting." She makes a living from her hunting and an innate ability to decide whether a new logo will succeed; talents that pay enough to keep her in iBooks and plain black clothing from which she carefully removes all labels (though she seems capable of withstanding that little bitten rainbow apple...)

Cayce's also a footage fanatic; member of a worldwide community addicted to strange fragments of film whose meaning, setting, and provenance have proven impossible to parse. These snippets have been appearing at irregular intervals for three years. Each new segment brings footage fans no closer to understanding any aspect of the footage, nor does it bring them closer to discovery of their genesis. All that may be about to change, though, when a bleeding-edge advertising company hires Cayce to find the source of the footage, giving her a nearly unlimited budget and all the firm's resources to go along with her talents and her connections.

Her hunt will lead her through London, Tokyo, and into a strange post-Soviet era Moscow; she'll rub elbows with Cold War spies and the practitioners of neo-industrial espionage. She'll run afoul of keystroke recorders and hotmail hackers; and learn first-hand that "on the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." And when all is said and done, she'll learn - perhaps - the answer to the question that has haunted her since September 11, 2001: is her father really dead?

William Gibson is to the wired generation what Jack Kerouac was to the beat generation, a wordsmith to chronicle the movement from a hidden spot near the focal point of its psyche. For years Gibson has pondered the near future with such works as Neuromancer and Mona Lisa Overdrive, prognostications that included Borg-like hardware implants and self-contained portable virtual reality. Now he's stepped backward to the present with an in-depth examination of some of the worldwide web's most striking phenomena of the day: online communities, complete with their flames, facades, and phonies; and the near-instantaneous birth and death of fad and fashion.

That he can build a world so like our own and seamlessly insert into it the notion of "the footage" is testament to Gibson's grasp of the culture he describes. He has built an entire subculture surrounding his invention, a subculture that occasionally impinges on the larger world - such is the usefulness an advertiser might wish to exploit. The characters of his community exhibit, as do so many on 'net and web, their essential duality. Public personas are smiling and jovial, while in the background motion and motive are sometimes poisonous. Pattern Recognition serves in that respect as a cautionary tale for all of us - you can't necessarily trust anyone you haven't met face to face, and not all of those you have.
By dipping into the present of the 'net and inventing a world that isn't - but could be - William Gibson has further solidified his hold on his title as the literary soul of the movement. In doing so, he gives his readers an opportunity to examine how pointless so much of what we here can be, yet how much it might actually mean for us.

Summary

PLUS: Classic Gibson characters, yet set in the present

MINUS: A bit on the pointless side

WHAT THEY'RE SAYING: At last, a review of a William Gibson book that doesn't contain the word "cyberpunk."

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