Pattern Recognition (novel) - Wikipedia

Pattern Recognition (novel) - Wikipedia
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2003 novel by William Gibson
Pattern Recognition
Original first edition cover
Author
William Gibson
Language
Series
Bigend cycle
Genre
Science fiction
Published
February 3, 2003 (
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Publication place
United States
Media type
Print (
hardcover
and
paperback
),
audiobook
Pages
368 pp (hardcover)
ISBN
0-399-14986-4
OCLC
49894062
Dewey Decimal
813/.54 21
LC Class
PS3557.I2264 P38 2003
Followed by
Spook Country
Pattern Recognition
is a novel by the American
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 action takes place in London, Tokyo, and Moscow as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to find the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet.
The novel's central theme examines 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 have noted that
Pattern Recognition
was influenced by
Thomas Pynchon
's postmodern detective story
The Crying of Lot 49
Pattern Recognition
was Gibson's eighth novel and his first to be set in the contemporary world. Like his previous works, it has been classified as a science fiction and
postmodern
novel, with the action unfolding along a
thriller
plot line. Critics approved of the writing but found the plot unoriginal and some of the language distracting. 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.
Background
edit
Before writing
Pattern Recognition
, the author,
William Gibson
, published seven novels (one co-written) and numerous short stories beginning in 1977. His previous novel,
All Tomorrow's Parties
, was published in October 1999 as the conclusion of the
Bridge trilogy
Pattern Recognition
was written between 2001 and 2002 while Gibson was living in
Vancouver
British Columbia
and released in February 2003.
Pattern Recognition
was originally intended to be a stand-alone novel,
but afterwards Gibson wrote
Spook Country
and
Zero History
which take place in the same universe and use some of the same characters.
Gibson traveled to Tokyo in 2001 to prepare for this new novel, which takes place in London, Moscow, and Tokyo.
He did not travel to London or Moscow but used interviews with friends and internet resources for research.
In September 2001 Gibson had written about 100 pages but was struggling to finish. He stopped writing after watching the
September 11, 2001 attacks
on television and "realized [the novel] had become a story that took place in an
alternate time track
, in which Sept. 11 hadn't happened".
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-9/11 draft, London felt more like London is feeling right now. Cayce keeps seeing trucks full of soldiers. But I took that out, because as it got closer to the time, it wasn't actually happening."
Plot summary
edit
Advertising consultant
Cayce Pollard
, who reacts to logos and advertising as if to an
allergen
, arrives in London in August 2002. She is working on a contract with the marketing firm Blue Ant to judge the effectiveness of a proposed corporate logo for a shoe company. During the presentation, graphic designer Dorotea Benedetti becomes hostile towards Cayce as she rejects the first proposal. After dinner with some Blue Ant employees, the company founder
Hubertus Bigend
offers Cayce a new contract: to uncover who is responsible for distributing a series of anonymous, artistic film clips via the internet. Cayce had been following the film clips and participating in an online discussion forum theorizing on the clips' meaning, setting, and other aspects. Wary of corrupting the artistic process and mystery of the clips, she reluctantly accepts. Cayce is not entirely comfortable with
Ivy's
chat group called "Fetish:Footage:Forum" (or F:F:F), as shown by the following excerpt:
There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of
lurkers
. And right now there are three people in Chat, but there's no way of knowing exactly who until you are in there, and the chat room she finds not so comforting. It's strange even with friends, like sitting in a pitch-dark cellar conversing with people at a distance of about fifteen feet.
A friend from the discussion group, who uses the handle Parkaboy, privately emails her saying a friend of a friend has discovered an encrypted
watermark
on one clip. They concoct a fake persona, a young woman named Keiko, to seduce the Japanese man who knows the watermark code. Cayce, along with an American computer security specialist, Boone Chu, hired to assist her, travels to Tokyo to meet the man and retrieve the watermark code. Two men attempt to steal the code but Cayce escapes and travels back to London. Boone travels to Columbus, Ohio to investigate the company that he believes created the watermark. Meanwhile, Blue Ant hires Dorotea who reveals that she was previously employed by a Russian lawyer whose clients have been investigating Cayce. The clients wanted Cayce to refuse the job of tracking the film clips and it was Dorotea's responsibility to ensure this.
Through a completely random encounter Cayce meets Voytek Biroshak and Ngemi, the former an artist using old
ZX81
microcomputers as a sculpture medium, the latter a collector of rare technology (he mentions purchasing Stephen King's word processor, for example). Another collector, and sometime 'friend' of Ngemi's, Hobbs Baranov, is a retired cryptographer and mathematician with connections in the American
National Security Agency
. Cayce strikes a deal with him: she buys a
Curta calculator
for him and he finds the email address to which the watermark code was sent. Using this email address Cayce makes contact with Stella Volkova whose sister Nora is the maker of the film clips.
Cayce flies to Moscow to meet Stella in person and watch Nora work. Nora is brain damaged from an assassination attempt and can only express herself through film. At her hotel, Cayce is intercepted and drugged by Dorotea and wakes up in a mysterious prison facility. Cayce escapes; exhausted, disoriented and lost, she nearly collapses as Parkaboy, who upon Cayce's request was flown to Moscow, retrieves her and brings her to the prison where the film is processed. There Hubertus, Stella and Nora's uncle Andrei, and the latter's security employees are waiting for her. Over dinner with Cayce, the Russians reveal that they have been spying on her since she posted to a discussion forum speculating that the clips may be controlled by the
Russian Mafia
. They had let her track the clips to expose any security breaches in their distribution network. The Russians surrender all the information they had collected on her father's disappearance and the book ends with Cayce coming to terms with his absence while in Paris with Parkaboy, whose real name is Peter Gilbert.
Characters
edit
Cayce Pollard
– A 32-year-old woman who lives in New York City. She pronounces her given name "Case" although her parents named her after
Edgar Cayce
. She uses her interest in marketing trends and fads, and her psychological sensitivity to logos and advertising, in her work as an advertising consultant. Her sensitivity becomes a phobia towards older corporate mascots, especially the
Michelin Man
. She wears only black, gray or white, usually
Fruit of the Loom
shrunken cotton T-shirts (all tags removed) with Levis jeans (with the trademarks filed off the buttons) or skirts, tights, boots, as well as a black
Buzz Rickson
MA-1 bomber jacket
. (Buzz Rickson did not produce the MA-1 in black, but due to demand created by the novel, began offering a "William Gibson collection" black MA-1.
Hubertus Bigend
– The 35-year-old founder of advertising agency
Blue Ant
. He was born in Belgium but educated at a British
boarding school
and at
Harvard University
Dorotea Benedetti
– The representative of the
graphic design
company. She has a background in
industrial espionage
and is secretly hired to encourage Cayce to leave London without accepting Bigend's offer to track the film clips.
Bernard Stonestreet
– A representative of the advertising agency
Blue Ant
"Parkaboy"/Peter Gilbert
– Cayce's friend from the online discussion forum. He lives in
Chicago
and describes himself as a "middle-aged white guy since 1967".
Boone Chu
– A Chinese-American living in
Washington state
, but raised in
Oklahoma
. He had a failed start-up company specializing in security. He is hired to assist Cayce in the search for the maker of the footage.
Voytek Biroshak
– A blond man born in
Poland
and raised in
Russia
. He acquires and sells antique calculators to raise funds for an exhibition on
Sinclair ZX81
computers.
Damien Pease
– A 30-year-old friend of Cayce whose flat she stays at while in London. He is a video director shooting a documentary on
WWII battleground
excavation near
Stalingrad
Hobbs Baranov
– A former
NSA
cryptographer
and
mathematician
. He collects antique calculators and sells
intelligence
as he squats near
Poole
with a
Gypsy
group.
Ivy
– Creator of website, discussion group, and chatroom Fetish:Footage:Forum that Cayce frequents. The website's intention is to discuss the anonymous film postings.
Style and story elements
edit
The novel uses a
third-person narrative
in the present tense with a somber tone reminiscent of a "low-level post-apocalypticism".
Cayce's memories of the
September 11, 2001 attacks
, which briefly use the future tense,
are told by Gibson as "a
Benjaminian
seed of time", as one reviewer calls it, because of the
monistic
and lyrical descriptions of Cayce's relationship to objects with the attacks in the background.
Two
neologisms
appear in the novel:
gender-bait
and
mirror-world
. Gibson created the term
mirror-world
to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets.
Gender-bait
refers to a male posing as a female online to elicit positive responses. The term
coolhunter
, not coined by Gibson but used in the marketing industry for several years, is used to describe Cayce's profession of identifying the roots of emerging trends.
10
11
The September 11, 2001 attacks are used as a
motif
representing a break with the past with Cayce's father, who disappears during the attacks, as the personification of the 20th century. Gibson viewed the attacks as a nodal point after which "nothing is really the same".
12
One reviewer commented that in "Gibson's view, 9-11 was the end of history; after it we are without a history, careening toward an unknown future without the benefit of a past—our lives before 9-11 are now irrelevant."
13
Cayce's search for her father and Damien's excavation of the German bomber symbolize the
historicist
search for a method to interpret people's actions in the past. Coming to terms with her father's disappearance may be interpreted as a requiem for those lost to the 20th century,
12
something that may have been influenced by Gibson coming to terms with the loss of his own father.
The film clips are a motif used to enhance the theme of the desire to find meaning or detect patterns. They are released over the internet and gain a cult following, in the same way that the
lonelygirl15
videoblog gained an international following in 2006.
14
Corporate interest in the footage is aroused by its originality and global distribution methods. The characters debate whether the anonymous clips are part of a complete narrative or a work in progress, and when or where they were shot. This enigmatic nature of the footage is said to metaphorically represent the nature of the confusing and uncertain post-9/11 future.
15
The author
Dennis Danvers
has remarked that the footage being edited down to a single frame is like the world compressed into a single novel.
16
The footage, released freely to a global audience with a lack of time or place indicators, has also been contrasted to
Pattern Recognition
written under contract for a large corporation and which uses liminal name-dropping that definitively sets it in London, Tokyo, and Moscow in 2002.
17
Major themes
edit
Pattern recognition
edit
Parkaboy says you should go to new footage as though you've seen no previous footage at all, thereby momentarily escaping the film or films you've been assembling with, consciously or unconsciously, since first exposure. Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.
Cayce Pollard
Pattern Recognition
, pages 22–23.
The central theme throughout the novel involves the natural human propensity to search for
meaning
with the constant risk of
apophenia
18
Followers of the seemingly random clips seek connections and meaningfulness in them but are revealed to be victims of apophenia as the clips are just edited surveillance camera footage. Likewise, Cayce's mother turns to investigating
electronic voice phenomena
after Cayce's father disappears. Science fiction critic Thomas Wagner underscores the desire for meaning, or
pattern recognition
, using a comparison between the film clips and Cayce's search for her father after the attacks:
[T]he very
randomness
and ineffability of the clips flies in the face of our natural human tendency towards pattern recognition ... [T]he subculture that surrounds "following the footage" ... [is] an effective plot device for underscoring the novel's post-9/11 themes: to wit, the uncertainty of the fabric of day-to-day life people began to feel following that event … [We] as people don't like uncertainty, don't like knowing that there's something we can't comprehend. And if we can't fit something into an existing pattern, then by golly we'll come up with one.
19
Within the marketing world, Cayce is portrayed not as an outside rebel, but rather a paragon of the system. Inescapably within the system, she seeks an
epistemological perspective
to objectively interpret patterns.
19
20
The review of the novel in
The Village Voice
calls this search "a survival tactic within the context of no context—dowsing for meaning, and sometimes settling for the illusion of meaning".
21
Memory of history
edit
The future is there ... looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now. ... I only know that the one constant in history is change: The past changes. Our version of the past will interest the future about the extent we're interested in whatever past the Victorians believed in. It simply won't seem very relevant.
— Cayce Pollard (echoing the views of Parkaboy),
Pattern Recognition
, page 59.
Using 20th-century relics, such as a
Curta calculator
, an excavated
Stuka
, Hobbs Baranov, and Voytek's planned
ZX81
show, Gibson raises the question of how a contemporary society views past societies. Gibson portrays the past century as dominated by conflict, suspicion, and espionage. Following the disappearance of Cayce's father, a designer of embassy security systems, on September 11, 2001, Cayce is left feeling "ungrieved" until she reviews footage and records of that day tracking his movements until he vanishes.
22
Following this line of thought Gibson raises the question of how the future will view today's society. The novel "adopts a postmodern
historicism
17
perspective, through the arguments presented by Bigend, Cayce, and Parkaboy. Bigend and Cayce's view of history are compared to those of philosopher
Benedetto Croce
in that they believe history is open for interpretation when re-written from the frame of reference of another society. Parkaboy rejects this view, believing that history can be an exact science.
17
Originality and monoculture
edit
The book explores a tension between originality and monoculture by focusing on the artist's relationship with a
commercialized
world and its
marketing
of free art and
consumer products
23
Critic Lisa Zeidner argues that the artist's "loyalty and love"
23
involved with creating originality counters Bigend's assertion that everything is a reflection of something else and that the creative process no longer rests with the individual. Commercialism is portrayed as a monoculture that assimilates originality. The
Tommy Hilfiger
brand is used as an example, "
simulacra
of simulacra of simulacra. A dilute tincture of
Ralph Lauren
, who had himself diluted the glory days of
Brooks Brothers
, who themselves had stepped on the product of
Jermyn Street
and
Savile Row
... There must be some Tommy Hilfiger
event horizon
, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul."
24
One critic points out that the marketing agency Blue Ant is named after the wasp
Blue Ant
: "it's a wasp with a painful sting. The female hunts for a ground-dwelling cricket. She paralyses it with a sting and lays her egg on it. The still living yet immobile cricket becomes food for the wasp's young. What a clever metaphor for the process of targeting, commodifying, and marketing cool."
25
On the other hand, as
Rudy Rucker
notes, while new art is constantly threatened by commodification, it is dependent on the monoculture for its launching point and uniqueness.
26
Gibson's product positioning language and Cayce's analysis of consumerist trends show that society is not a victim of consumerism, but rather its creator who helps shape it without ever stepping outside it.
Alex Link argues that rather than a simple attack on consumerism outright, the novel outlines a complex interrelationship between art, brand design, and terrorism as varying attitudes to history, terror, and community.
27
Branding, identity, and globalization
edit
The novel's language is viewed as rife with labeling and product placements.
28
Postmodern theorist
Fredric Jameson
calls it "a kind of hyped-up name-dropping ... [where] an encyclopaedic familiarity with the fashions ... [creates] class status as a matter of knowing the score rather than of having money and power".
29
He also calls it "postmodern nominalism"
29
in that the names express the new and fashionable.
29
This name-dropping demonstrates how commercialism has created and named new objects and experiences and renamed (or re-created) some that already existed. This naming includes nationalities; there are eight references to nationality (or locality) in the first three pages. Zeidner wrote that the novel's "new century is unsettlingly transitional making it difficult to maintain an individual identity".
23
One character argues that "there will soon be no national identity left … [as] all experience [will be] reduced, by the spectral hand of marketing, to price-point variations on the same thing."
30
This is juxtaposed against the footage that contains no hints of time period or location.
Globalization is represented by characters of varying nationalities, ease of international travel, portable instant communication, and commercial monoculture recognizable across international markets. As an example, Gibson writes how one 'yes or no' decision by Cayce on the logo will impact the lives of the people in remote places who will manufacture the logos and how it will infect their dreams.
12
Genre
edit
[W]e have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition.
Hubertus Bigend
Pattern Recognition
, pages 58–59.
While some reviewers regard the novel as a
thriller
31
others see it as an example of post-millennial science fiction with stories set in the "technocultural future-present".
32
Some reviewers note that the novel furthers the post-millennial trend in science fiction of illustrating society's inability to imagine a definitive future
and the use of technologies once considered advanced or academic now commonplace within society and its vernacular.
33
Gibson said that the only science fiction elements are "[t]he Footage and Cayce's special talents" but that he "never bought that conceit that science fiction is about the future".
34
Dennis Danvers
explained the use of science fiction as a narrative strategy:
[s]cience fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well, without resorting to magic or the supernatural, where the fantasy folks work. A realist wrestling with the woes of the middle class can leave the world out of it by and large except for an occasional swipe at the shallowness of suburbia. A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it's the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson's point ... is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we're all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the "real world" now has to answer the question, "Which one?"
16
These elements, and the use of the September 11, 2001, attacks as a breaking point from the past, led academics to label it a
postmodern novel
. The attacks mark the point where the 'modern', that is the 20th-century certainty in society's advancement towards a better future, changed to the 'postmodern', that is the 21st-century uncertainty in which future will develop.
Fredric Jameson
finds Gibson using culture as the determinant of change for the first time with this novel, rather than technology. Jameson focuses on the novel's "postmodern nominalism" that uses brand names to refresh old objects and experiences.
29
In
post-structural literary theory
Cayce is compared with the main character, Oedipa Maas, of Thomas Pynchon's
The Crying of Lot 49
as detectives interpreting clues but with neither the character nor the reader knowing if there actually is a pattern to be found and, if there is one, whether it is real or conspiracy.
20
Gibson's use of name-dropping brands to create a sense of "in-group style … of those in the know" is traced back to Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel
V.
29
Gibson's writing style is said to be similar to
Raymond Chandler
's detective stories
31
and Alfred Hitchcock's thrillers that used
MacGuffins
(the identity of the maker of the footage, in this case) to drive the story.
26
Gibson's social observations are influenced by the works of
Naomi Klein
and
Malcolm Gladwell
35
While markedly different from his previous writing, in that it is not set in an imaginary future with imaginary technologies,
Pattern Recognition
includes many of his previous elements, including impacts of technology shifts on society, Japanese computer experts and Russian mafia figures.
36
In common with Gibson's previous work,
Paul Di Filippo
found in
Pattern Recognition
: "the close observation of the culture's
bleeding edge
; an analysis of the ways technology molds our every moment; the contrasting of boardroom with street; the impossibility and dire necessity of making art in the face of instant co-optation; the damaged loner facing the powers-that-be, for both principle and profit".
37
Reception
edit
Pattern Recognition
was released on February 3, 2003, as Gibson launched a 15-city tour.
25
The novel was featured on the January 19 cover of
The New York Times Book Review
. In the American market it peaked at number four on the
New York Times
Best Seller list
for hardcover fiction on February 23 and spent nine weeks on
USA Today's
Top 150 Best-Selling Books, peaking at number 34.
38
39
In the Canadian market, the novel peaked at number three on
The Globe and Mail
's
best seller list on February 15 in the hardcover fiction category.
40
The novel was shortlisted for the 2004
Arthur C. Clarke Award
and the
British Science Fiction Association Award
41
42
Gibson's writing was positively received by science fiction writers
Dennis Danvers
Candas Jane Dorsey
, and
Rudy Rucker
16
26
43
Rucker has written: "[w]ith a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics"
26
and Danvers wrote that "no sentence has a subject if it can do without one".
16
One critic found the prose to be as "hard and compact as glacier ice"
21
and another that it "gives us sharply observed small moments inscribed with crystalline clarity".
33
Gibson's descriptions of interiors and of the built environments of Tokyo, Russia and London were singled out as impressive,
29
31
44
and
The Village Voice
s review remarked that "Gibson expertly replicates the biosphere of a discussion board: the coffee-shop intimacy, the fishbowl paranoia, the splintering factions, the inevitable flame war".
21
Lisa Zeidner of
The New York Times Book Review
elaborated:
As usual, Gibson's prose is ... corpuscular, crenelated. His sentences slide from silk to steel, and take tonal joy rides from the ironic to the earnest. But he never gets lost in the language, as he sometimes has in the past. Structurally, this may be his most confident novel. The secondary characters and their subplots are more fully developed, right down to their personal e-mail styles. Without any metafictional grandstanding, Gibson nails the texture of Internet culture: how it feels to be close to someone you know only as a voice in a chat room, or to fret about someone spying on your browser's list of sites visited.
23
Filled with name-dropping of businesses and products, such as
MUJI
Hotmail
iBook
Netscape
, and
G4
, the language of the novel was judged by one critic to be "awkward in its effort to appear "cool" "
45
while other critics have found it overdone and feared it would quickly date the novel.
19
37
The
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
review commented that the "constant, unadulterated "hipster-technocrat, cyber-MTV" lingo [is] overdone and inappropriate"
28
On the technology,
Cory Doctorow
found Gibson's use of
watermarks
and
keystroke logging
to be hollow and has noted that "Gibson is no technologist, he's an accomplished and insightful
social critic
... and he treats these items from the real world as metaphor. But ... Gibson's metaphorical treatment of these technologies will date this very fine book".
46
Some critics found the plot to be a conventional "unravel-the-secret"
19
and "woman on a quest"
16
thriller.
23
Toby Litt
wrote that "[j]udged just as a thriller,
Pattern Recognition
takes too long to kickstart, gives its big secrets away before it should and never puts the heroine in believable peril".
18
The conclusion, called "unnecessarily pat"
47
by one critic, was compared by Litt with the "ultimate fantasy ending of 1980s movies – the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has kept her integrity but still ended up filthy rich."
18
The review in the
Library Journal
called the novel a "melodrama of beset geekdom" that "may well reveal the emptiness at the core of Gibson's other fiction", but recommended it for all libraries due to the author's popularity.
48
Publication history
edit
Book covers for the (top left to right) North American (paperback), British (hard cover), British (paperback), Dutch, French, (bottom left to right) Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Polish releases
The hardcover edition, released in February 2003, was published by the Penguin Group imprint
G. P. Putnam's Sons
Berkley Books
published the
trade paperback
one year later, on February 3, 2004, and a
mass market paperback
in February 2005. In the UK the paperback was published by
Penguin Books
a year after its
Viking Press
imprint published the hardcover version. In 2004 it was published in French, Danish, Japanese, German, and Spanish. In 2005 the book was published in Russia. The translation made by Nikita Krasnikov was awarded as the best translation of the year.
49
Tantor Media
published the 10.5-hour-long, unabridged
audiobook
on April 1, 2004, and re-released it on January 1, 2005. Voiced by Shelly Frasier, it was criticized by
John Adams
of
Locus
as being pleasant but with distracting dialects.
50
Adaptations
edit
The digital radio station BBC 7 broadcast (now
BBC Radio 4 Extra
) an abridged version of the novel, voiced by
Lorelei King
, in five 30-minute episodes in February and October 2007.
51
Post-punk band Sonic Youth included a track called "Pattern Recognition" on their 2004 album
Sonic Nurse
that opens with the lyric "I'm a cool hunter making you my way".
52
A film adaptation was initiated in April 2004 with producer
Steve Golin
's production company Anonymous Content and the studio Warner Bros. Pictures hiring director
Peter Weir
53
Screenwriters
David Arata
D. B. Weiss
, and Weir co-wrote the screenplay
54
but in May 2007, Gibson commented on his personal blog that he believed Weir would not be proceeding with the project.
55
Footnotes
edit
Gill, Alexandra (February 8, 2003). "Back in the here and now".
The Globe and Mail
Toronto
. pp. R19.
Gibson, William
(April 30, 2003).
"Finding faces in the clouds"
The Daily Telegraph
(Interview). Interviewed by Fiona Graham. Archived from
the original
on July 28, 2003
. Retrieved
2007-12-16
Gibson, William (September 2001).
"My Own Private Tokyo"
Wired
. Vol. 9, no. 9
. Retrieved
2008-01-06
Lim, Dennis (12 February 2003).
"Think Different"
The Village Voice
. Archived from
the original
on 2008-01-15
. Retrieved
2007-12-30
Gibson, William (February 3, 2003).
"Hi Parkaboy. nt"
. Putnam Adult. Archived from
the original
on September 28, 2011
. Retrieved
2013-05-02
Gibson,
"Buzz in Black"
Hollinger, Veronica (November 2006). "Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition".
Science Fiction Studies
33
(100). SFS Publications:
452–
471.
ISSN
0091-7729
OCLC
1787622
Smith, Jeremy (21 February 2004).
"Pattern Recognition by William Gibson"
. infinity plus
. Retrieved
2007-12-15
Taylor, Paul (2006).
"Pattern Recognition in Fast Capitalism: Calling Literary Time on the Theorists of Flux"
Fast Capitalism
(1):
47–
60.
doi
10.32855/fcapital.200601.005
. Retrieved
2008-01-01
Gladwell, Malcolm
(17 March 2007).
"The Coolhunt"
The New Yorker
. Archived from
the original
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"Pattern Recognition"
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Ahrens, Frank (17 September 2006).
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Rapatzikou, Tatiani (2004).
Gothic Motifs in the Fiction of William Gibson
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Danvers, Dennis
(Spring 2003).
"Review: Pattern Recognition by William Gibson"
Blackbird
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Easterbrook, Neil (November 2006). "Alternate Presents: The Ambivalent Historicism of
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Science Fiction Studies
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Litt, Toby
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"Back to the 80s"
The Guardian
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Wagner, Thomas M. (2003).
"Pattern Recognition"
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2007-11-29
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City
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Zeidner, Lisa (January 19, 2003).
"Netscape"
The New York Times Book Review
. Retrieved
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Lieb, Rebecca (February 7, 2003).
"Pattern Recognition: Marketing's Mirror World"
. ClickZ Network. Archived from
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Rucker, Rudy (February 2003).
"Logomancer"
Wired
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Contemporary Literature
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. Retrieved
2011-01-18
{{
cite journal
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: CS1 maint: deprecated archival service (
link
Jolis, Anne (March 16, 2003).
'Pattern Recognition' by William Gibson"
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
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Financial Times
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(February 24, 2003).
"The Case of the World"
Science Fiction Weekly
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Bolhafner, J. Stephen (April 20, 2003).
"Pattern Recognition"
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
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2009-03-15
"Interview: William Gibson".
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"William Gibson: Pattern Recognition"
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. Retrieved
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(February 2, 2003).
"Prophets and Losses"
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"Best Sellers: Hardcover Fiction"
The New York Times
. February 23, 2003
. Retrieved
2008-01-07
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2008-01-07
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"Pattern Recognition by William Gibson"
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Robinson, Bill (16 March 2003).
Pattern Recognition
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"The cyberpunk arrives at the present"
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External links
edit
William Gibson Books:
Pattern Recognition
; author's site
PR-Otaku
: Logging and annotating William Gibson's
Pattern Recognition
Pattern Recognition
at
IMDb
Buzz Rickson "Pattern Recognition" Black MA-1 Intermediate Flying Jacket
Audio interview at CBC Bookclub –
Pattern Recognition
(1hr) from 2003: part one runs 16 min; part two runs 9 min; part three runs 17 min; part four runs 9 min
Pattern Recognition
at Worlds Without End
William Gibson's Pattern Recognition: Jet-Lagged Intimations of the Present
by Jose Angel García Landa,
Social Science Research Network
William Gibson
List of works
List of awards and nominations
Novels
Sprawl trilogy
Neuromancer
(1984)
Count Zero
(1986)
Mona Lisa Overdrive
(1988)
Bridge trilogy
Virtual Light
(1993)
Idoru
(1996)
All Tomorrow's Parties
(1999)
Blue Ant trilogy
Pattern Recognition
(2003)
Spook Country
(2007)
Zero History
(2010)
Jackpot series
The Peripheral
(2014)
Agency
(2020)
Other
The Difference Engine
(with
Bruce Sterling
) (1990)
Archangel
(2016)
Short stories
Fragments of a Hologram Rose
Johnny Mnemonic
The Gernsback Continuum
Hinterlands
New Rose Hotel
The Belonging Kind
Burning Chrome
Red Star, Winter Orbit
The Winter Market
Dogfight
Skinner's Room
Burning Chrome
collection
Nonfiction
Agrippa (A Book of the Dead)
Disneyland with the Death Penalty
No Maps for These Territories
Distrust That Particular Flavor
Television
Kill Switch
First Person Shooter
Characters
Molly Millions
Bobby Newmark
Rei Toei
Cayce Pollard
Hubertus Bigend
Story elements
Cyberspace
Megacorporation
Locative art
Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics
Raygun Gothic
Derivative works
Neuromancer
video game
Johnny Mnemonic
film
Johnny Mnemonic
Video game
New Rose Hotel
film
Node Magazine
William Gibson: A Literary Companion
The Peripheral
TV series
Neuromancer
TV series
Authority control databases
Open Library
Retrieved from "
Categories
2003 American novels
Novels by William Gibson
Techno-thriller novels
Fiction set in 2002
Novels set in London
Novels set in Tokyo
Novels set in Moscow
G. P. Putnam's Sons books
Japan in non-Japanese culture
American English-language novels
Canadian English-language novels
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