Most people who have a passing knowledge of William Gibson remember him from either his ill-fated Johnny Mnemonic or his widely worshipped Neuromancer.  Fans of his work know him as the godfather of cyberpunk and inventor of the word cyberspace (I shit you not).  The truly devoted, which I am not, have read all his works, written their own fanfictions, and love his DOA script for Alien III.  Incidentally, the script is alright.  It’s creepy.  As a clown is creepy.  When he offers you a sweaty handful of rock candy.  In a forest or something.  Forget it.

 

One of Gibson’s most recent works was a 2003 novel titled Pattern Recognition.  If you’re looking for yakuza with lasers or characters that blur the gap between humanity and machinery, you won’t find them here.  What you will find is a window into our globalized culture and what I’ve started thinking of as international cool. 

 

Cayce Pollard is a coolhunter and freelance advertising consultant with a unique allergy.  If a proposed logo, brand name, mascot, or other advertising tool will succeed in the market, she instantly knows it in the deepest, darkest parts of her psyche.  Her allergy is a deep, intuitive understanding of youth culture, but sometimes it turns on her.  For instance, the Michelin Man is so intensely uncool that the sight of him gives her panic attacks.  To relax in an article of clothing, she has to remove all logos and brand markings, even using a key grinder to remove tiny Levi’s logo from the buttons of her jeans.  Still, she’s very good at hunting cool.  By looking at a crowd, she can tell which little touches of fashion will be a fully commodified trend next year.  In her quest for the source of chic, she even managed to track down the first guy to make a statement of wearing his hat backward.

 

The story revolves around her quest to locate a secret movie maker whose leaked film segments have captured the imaginations of an entire internet subculture.  As a science fiction story, Pattern Recognition is surprisingly free of technology.  Mentions of digital watermarking and ancient calculators are fun but seem ancillary to Cayce’s fundamental predicament: she desperately wants to find the filmmaker, but she can’t stand the idea of the movie clips being turned into commodities and, ultimately, destroyed by commerce.  Behind it all is the idea that the current state of culture is in such violent flux that the trends discovered by Cayce and her peers can only be gripped for a moment, turned for profit, and quietly forgotten as they fade into the detritus of this generation’s cultural leavings. 

 

Like all good science fiction, Pattern Recognition is a critique of contemporary society.  However, instead of being set in the impossibly far future, commenting on our society through telescopes and metaphors of aliens, Gibson’s book is planted firmly in 2002.  On the surface, it’s a thriller but not a very convincing one.  Beneath that, heavily dated by specific references to brand names and models of computers, cars, and clothing, the book takes a snapshot of postmodern culture as it flips and floats in the wake of infinite memes spreading instantaneously over the world wide web. 

 

As you can probably tell, this is my kind of book.  If you enjoy living at the intersection of technology and culture, it’s probably yours, too.  Just remember three things: don’t feed trolls, Russians are dangerous, and apophenia is seriously not cool.

 

Happy reading.