Book Review: "Pattern Recognition"
Category: Advertising... Books & Writing...
Posted Wednesday, March 10, 2004 at 04:36 PM [GMT-6]

I finished reading William Gibson's novel, "Pattern Recognition" a few days ago, and, frankly, I was underwhelmed.

Gibson is, of course, the guy whose 1984 novel "Neuromancer" created the cyberpunk genre (and he gets the credit for coining the term "cyberspace" in that book, although the meaning has shifted over time to something different). I naturally assumed that "Pattern Recognition" would continue the trend of edgy and cutting-edge technology-driven characters and plots. Instead, Gibson delivers a fairly standard mystery scenario and the technology rarely gets more advanced than someone hacking into the heroine's iBook. Granted, steganography plays a role in the plot, but it's almost a throwaway reference.

This would have been OK if Gibson hadn't been trying to be cool. You get the feeling that he's trying to keep up, but can't quite pull it off. He has his characters use Google to find out secret stuff about other people; he might have at least used "google" as a lower-case verb, 'k? Also, one of the primary plotlines involves the interaction of participants in a message board, discussing the meaning and origin of various video clips discovered in the nooks and crannies of the www. Message board? Really, Bill...ever heard of a blog, or, even better, a wiki? (Of course, if you ask Google [upper case, this time] for a definition of "wiki," you get a big old cyberblank, so maybe his research was just faulty.)

Anyway, I can't really blame Mr. Gibson for my apparently misguided expectations. Perhaps he's trying to shed the cyberpunk rep and is going for another look altogether. And if you approach the book from the perspective of a simple low-tech mystery, it's OK. I still got the feeling he was just on autopilot, though, and breezed through this one without breaking a sweat. Unfortunately, that's the same way I read it.

[If you want a tech-heavy plot with good character development and stimulating prose, try Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon." The king is dead; long live the king.]