PATTERN RECOGNITION

Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson
(New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2003)

Science fiction is usually an attempt to make the unfamiliar familiar, to bring us ordinary car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching humans into worlds where cars fly, Guiness comes in pill form, paper is strictly rationed and TV is fully interactive. Outer space. Alternate histories where the Nazis won or where the computer was invented in the 19th century. Time travel.

But now, when, as David Foster Wallace observes "we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall's fall - i.e. when damn near everything presents itself as familiar" the real challenge is making the familiar strange.

Which brings me to William Gibson's latest novel, Pattern Recognition.

Pattern Recognition is a serious departure from the "high tech/low life" scenarios he developed for his Sprawl trilogy (Neuromancer, Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive) and his other stuff (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow's Parties). It is set very much in our aforementioned car-driving, Guiness-swilling, paper-wasting, TV-watching present, specifically about a year after the September 11 attacks; its milieu is the very internet in which you, my reader, and I, Your Humble Blogger am now engaged, a perfectly evoked subculture of fanatical followers of a mass of film snippets that surface online from time to time dubbed "the Footage," and the very 21st century "post-geographic" life of a 33 year old woman whose overwhelming sensitivity to media blitz, to corporate logos and branding, would be a crippling mental illness if she hadn't found a way to make it pay, and pay well.

Cayce Pollard is a human divining rod for marketing success, able to tune her hilarious and completely understandable allergy to bad media figures like the Michelin Man and Tommy Hilfiger to evaluate new logos and marketing strategies on a deeply intuitive level, only occasionally resorting to slyly funny criteria as is detailed early in Pattern Recognition when she is asked to give a yay or nay to a redesigned sneaker logo which resembles, to Cayce, a "syncopated sperm":

Briefly, though, she imagines the countless Asian workers who might, should she say yes, spend years of their lives applying versions of this symbol to an endless and unyielding flood of footwear. What would it mean to them, this bouncing sperm? Would it work its way into their dreams, eventually? Would their children chalk it in doorways before they knew its meaning as a trademark?

The story of Cayce's career as a "cool hunter", who keeps track of street fashion, noting trends almost before they emerge, who engages in early pattern recognition and then helps corporations "point commodifiers at it" would make a pretty interesting novel all by itself, but as usual Gibson has more on his mind than just the teasing out of cultural data like this.