Pattern Recognition (novel)

The book peaked at number four on the New York Times Best Seller list. Critics identify influences from Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern detective story The Crying of Lot 49. The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a motif representing the transition to the new century.

About Pattern Recognition (novel) in brief

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 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. 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 Recognitions from Thomas Pynchon’s postmodern detective story The Crying of Lot 49. 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. Cayce is not entirely comfortable with Ivy’s chat group called “Fetish: Footage: Forum”, as shown by the following excerpt: There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F: F: Chat, but there’s no way of knowing exactly who you are in there, and there’s a much larger number of lurkers until now: three people in three different chat rooms.

Cayce, along with an American security specialist, hired to retrieve a watermark on one clip, has discovered an encrypted friend of a friend. They concoct a fake persona, a young woman named Keiko Keiko, to seduce the Japanese man who knows the watermark code. A young American man, Boone Chu, helps Cayce to retrieve her computer and retrieve her friend’s phone number, saying a friend from the discussion group, who uses Parkaboy, privately emails her saying her friend is a friend of his. Like his previous work, it has been classified as a science fiction and postmodern novel, with the action unfolding along a thriller plot line. Gibson traveled to Tokyo in 2001 to prepare for this new novel. He did not travel to London or Moscow but used interviews with friends and internet resources for research. Gibson wrote Spook Country and Zero History which take place in the same universe and use some of the same characters. 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-911 draft, London felt more like London is feeling right now. But I took that out, because as it got closer to the time, it wasn’t actually happening”.

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