CONNECTICUT LIBRARIES
July/August 2003, Vol. 45, No. 7
William Gibson, who invented the term "cyberspace" in his 1984 science fiction cult novel, Neuromancer, has a new book that librarians will love. Pattern Recognition has it all--mystery, romance, a heroine with a missing father and a New Age mother whose occupation is trend spotting. And how can we librarians, who daily fight the digital divide, resist the "Prince of Cyberpunk Fiction," who Brent Staples, in his May 11, 2003 NY Times editorial, describes as "envisioning an information-obsessed, information-saturated future where stealing and protecting data are the main preoccupations, and access to information separates the haves from the have-nots."The novel opens with 32 year-old "coolhunter" Cayce Pollard on assignment in London for the Blue Ant agency to assess a new footwear logo. Cayce can identify new trends simply by walking among crowds of people in a street. She knows, on first sight, whether or not a new logo design will be a hit. Her special ability comes with a price, however, for Cayce is almost allergic to corporate logos and brands. (Think Tommy Hilfiger, Prada, Polo.) They make her feel like she has been poisoned, so Cayce cuts all the labels off her clothing and belongings.
As Bernadette Murphy writes in her March 4 LA Times review, "Cayce Pollard is the cutting edge of contemporary culture. An uber-cool young urban woman, Cayce is able to recognize hip trends before they take off, thereby allowing her marketing clients to "commodify" those trends and reap abundant profits. 'It's about group behavior pattern around a particular class of object,' Cayce explains. 'I try to recognize a pattern before anyone else does, and then I point a commodifier at it.'"
There are two developments on which the intricate plot of Pattern Recognition turns. First, what happened to Cayce's father, a security expert with possible ties to the CIA, who went missing in New York on September 11? Second, what is the story behind the anonymous "footage" with which Cayce, and a Web-based subculture known as "footageheads," have become obsessed?
The footage is a series of short, seemingly related film clips that appear at odd intervals on the Internet. The footageheads gather online to watch and track each segment as it appears, spending hours in cyberspace debating the identity of the footage's possible creator, and whether the film is a work in progress or a completed narrative known only to the creator. The segments appear in what seems to be a random order, telling no particular story, but offering such compelling images that people become hooked on trying to figure out how it all fits together.
As Murphy says, "In these cinematic segments, Cayce glimpses a world more real, perhaps, than the actual world she knows, and wants nothing more than to see the whole film. The footage offers Cayce a respite from brand names and iconographic images in the world of trend forecasting."
At the completion of her assignment in London, Hubertus Bigend, Cayce's employer at Blue Ant, retains her on an unlimited expense account to track down the creator of the footage. The rest of the book is the story of Cayce's quest to find the elusive creator. Along the way she meets a cast of characters, including a lovelorn Japanese geek, a failed dot-com entrepreneur turned hacker, an evil and dangerous female competitor, an alcoholic cryptologist and a documentary maker excavating the skeletons of World War II casualties. Only the online assistance of a fellow footagehead known as Parkaboy allows Cayce to stay one step ahead of everyone else who's after the secret of the commercially valuable film clips. Cayce's quest eventually brings her to Russia, where she not only discovers the lyrical truth about the creator of the footage, and also comes to understand the circumstances of her father's disappearance.
Finally, Pattern Recognition works as both a good read (appropriate for the summer season) and also as insightful social commentary. As Paul Di Filippo, writes in the February 2 Washington Post, "Mr. Gibson foresaw the tyranny of market testing, which homogenizes everything from movies to food, opting every time for the lowest common denominator. Cayce is a stand-in for everyone in the hyperinformational present, where every wall, suitcase and shopping cart is plastered with ads. The contradiction of Cayce's life is clear: the more she hunts down the increasingly rare ''cool'' things, the more she facilitates the process by which the original and artistic are diluted and the world becomes ever more cluttered with derivative forms that pollute the perceptual field."
Gibson has written an edgy, intriguing morality tale that works for readers who browse both the sci-fi and the mystery sections. Besides, it's hip; Pattern Recognition is something you can share with a twenty-something.
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