William Gibson, BA

Hired to investigate a mysterious video collection that has been appearing on the Internet, market research consultant Cayce Pollard realizes that there is more to the assignment when her computer is hacked. Reprint.

Pattern Recognition

William F. Gibson

One of the most influential and imaginative sci-fi writers turns his attention to London - with dazzling results. 'Part-detective story, part-cultural snapshot . . . all bound by Gibson's pin-sharp prose' Arena ________________________ Cayce Pollard owes her living to her pathological sensitivity to logos. In London to consult for the world's coolest ad agency, she finds herself catapulted, via her addiction to a mysterious body of fragmentary film footage, uploaded to the Web by a shadowy auteur, into a global quest for this unknown "garage Kubrick". Cayce becomes involved with an eccentric hacker, a vengeful ad executive, a defrocked mathematician, a Tokyo Otaku-coven known as Eye of the Dragon and, eventually, the elusive Kubrick himself. William Gibson's novel is about the eternal mystery of London, the coolest sneakers in the world, and life in (the former) USSR. ________________________ 'A compelling, humane story with a sympathetic heroine searching for meaning and consolation in a post-everything world' Daily Telegraph 'A big novel, full of bold ideas . . . races along like an expert thriller' GQ 'It's dialogue and characterization will amaze you. A wonderfully detailed, reckless journey of espionage and lies' USA Today 'Electric, profound. Gibson's descriptions of Tokyo, Russia and London are surreally spot-on' Financial Times

里森

And then she hears the sound of a helicopter, from somewhere behind her and, turning, sees the long white beam of light sweeping the dead ground as it comes, like a lighthouse gone mad from loneliness, and searching that barren ground as foolishly, as randomly, as any grieving heart ever has.

People had time, in those days. The system was collapsing under its own weight, but everyone had a job, often a pointless one, very badly paid, but one could eat. People valued friendships, talked endlessly, ate and drank. For many people it was like the life of a student. A life of the spirit. Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.

Lots of Prada, Gucci, but in a Moneyed Bohemian modality too off-the-shelf for London or New York. LA, she realizes: except for two goth girls in black brocade, and a boy gotten up in impeccable High Grunge, it’s Rodeo Drive with an extra helping of cheekbones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_the_Great_Statue#/media/File:00_1423_Monument_to_Peter_I._in_Mosco.jpg

On the far shore, a vast cathedral, and on its own little island a statue of quite unthinkable awfulness. Her Lonely Planet tells her it’s Peter the Great, and must be guarded, else local aesthetes blow it up. It looks like a champagne fountain rented from caterers for an old-fashioned working-class wedding.

Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

“I had a cousin, back home,” says Ngemi, “who drank an entire electrical appliance business.

“Was he in a better mood, then?” he asks. “He showed me his gun.” “This is England, girl,” Ngemi says. “People don’t have guns.”

“Time is money, but also money is money.”

Fortunately she and Marina are almost immediately separated, conversationally, by Voytek, whose presence here Cayce initially accepts as a function of the Great Whatever of multiply impacted jet lag.

She makes sure the red light is on, on the oversized kettle-analog, wraps herself in last night’s white robe, goes to the window, powers open the drapes, and dimly discovers Tokyo at the bottom of an aquarium of rainy light. Gust-driven moisture shotguns the glass. The lavish lichen of the wooded palace grounds tosses darkly.

Italians who work in Tokyo ad agencies don’t wear Albanian Prada knockoffs.

https://therealmccoys.com/products/m-1951-parka

[She] sees a silver scooter go past, its driver wearing a matching silver helmet with a mirrored visor and what she recognizes as an M-1951 U.S. Army fishtail parka, an embroidered red-white-and-blue RAF roundel on its back, like a target.

A peaceful people for the most part, when their spells weren’t on them, but now one, younger perhaps than the others, looks at her out of blue and burning eyes, acetylene and ageless, from the depths of his affliction, and she shivers, and hurries on, wondering what it was he’d seen.

“The heart is a muscle,” Bigend corrects. “You ‘know’ in your limbic brain. The seat of instinct. The mammalian brain. Deeper, wider, beyond logic. That is where advertising works, not in the upstart cortex. What we think of as ‘mind’ is only a sort of jumped-up gland, piggybacking on the reptilian brainstem and the older, mammalian mind, but our culture tricks us into recognizing it as all of consciousness. The mammalian spreads continent-wide beneath it, mute and muscular, attending its ancient agenda. And makes us buy things.”

“Musicians, today, if they’re clever, put new compositions out on the web, like pies set to cool on a window ledge, and wait for other people to anonymously rework them. Ten will be all wrong, but the eleventh may be genius. And free. It’s as though the creative process is no longer contained within an individual skull, if indeed it ever was. Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”

The rain is done, the air clear as glass.

Homo sapiens are about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.

William Gibson

One of the most influential and imaginative writers of the past twenty years turns his attention to London - with dazzling results.Cayce Pollard owes her living to her pathological sensitivity to logos. In London to consult for the world's coolest ad agency, she finds herself catapulted, via her addiction to a mysterious body of fragmentary film footage, uploaded to the Web by a shadowy auteur, into a global quest for this unknown 'garage Kubrick'. Cayce becomes involved with an eccentric hacker, a vengeful ad executive, a defrocked mathematician, a Tokyo Otaku-coven known as Eye of the Dragon and, eventually, the elusive 'Kubrick' himself. William Gibson's new novel is about the eternal mystery of London, the coolest sneakers in the world, and life in (the former) USSR.

Gibson writes the kinds of cyberthrillers you immediately feel a part of. However stressful that may be.

Frederik De Bosschere

Jeff James

An excellent book with an amazingly well-drawn main character. The ending itself seemed kind of sudden, but so much of the book up to that point was so excellent, it is easy to overlook this minor fault.

Janice Hopper

My first real William Gibson novel. I've been looking for this one in ebook or audio format, and it recently became available in audio on Scribd. So I got it there.

It was ok. Stories that involve Russian mobsters (or really, any kind of mobsters) lose me. I thought the ending was weaker because of this.

In fact, I'm not entirely sure what the point of the whole thing was, TBH. The prose is a little dated, but not too bad. It was interesting.

Gibson can write fiction that isn’t science fiction and loses none of his magic! This being the first book in a trilogy whose creation spans Dotcom, 9/11, and the financial crisis, perhaps history was dystopian enough. Lyrical as ever with a strong postmodern undercurrent. Sometimes meant to be taken seriously, as in the theme of Beaudrillardian longing for preglobalized authenticity; sometimes cynical, as in a Sokalesque villain who generously quotes the French postmodernists, but whose words, the reader suspects, mean little.

Nat Welch

I reread this last year, and I had forgotten how great this book was. I'm a pretty big Gibson fan to begin with, but I was really impressed on how he kept this story turning and constantly kept me guessing. 

This book has an unusual plot, interesting characters and fun concepts. Would recommend to anyone who likes their books just a little bit strange and close to home.

Daryl Houston

Not great, but fine. Sort of Pynchon-lite minus the screwball.

Daniel Sollero

after reading it again: . just as good(or even better than the 1st time). amazing

Phil James

I'm re-reading this so I that can read the rest of the trilogy. I was lucky enough to find "spook country" second-hand and I'll have to get hold of his latest somehow.

Benjamin Lorenz

mbbs

Sherry

Lovro Oreskovic

John Manoogian III

Pierre

"Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive American design consultant with an international reputation. In London to evaluate the redesign of a famous corporate logo, she's offered a very different assignment: find the creator of the haunting, enigmatic video clips being uploaded to the internet by a party or parties unknown. Followers of this footage, and Cayce herself is one, are generating massive underground buzz, worldwide - and her new employer values buzz infinitely more than money." "But with her London apartment burgled, her email hacked, and the records of her Manhattan therapist stolen, she begins to suspect that more is at stake here, to someone, than she could ever have imagined." "Still, Cayce is her father's daughter. Win Pollard, Cold War security guru, was never a man to be deterred by the unimaginable. But the Cold War is over, and Win is missing, presumed dead, somewhere in Manhattan on the morning of September 11, 2001.".

"Cayce is soon phase-shifting through parallel universes of marketing, globalization, and terror, heading always for the still point where the three converge. From London to Tokyo to Moscow, and finally into the eerie aftermath of a Soviet eco-disaster, she follows the implications of a secret as disturbing, and compelling, as the twenty-first century promises to be." "A secret that may, ultimately, belong to her alone."--BOOK JACKET.

Pattern recognition

chris

Will Vunderink

Aaron J Mitchell

It's only called paranoia if you can't prove it. Cayce is in London to work. Her pathological sensitivity to brands makes her the perfect divining rod for an ad agency that wants to east a new logo. But when she is co-opted into the search for the creator of a strangely addictive on-line film, Cayce wonders if she has done the right - or indeed, safe - thing. And that's before violence, Japanese computer crazies and Russian Mafia men are in the mix. But she wants to discover the source of the film too, and the truth of her father's disappearance in New York, two years ago. And from the way people are trying to stop her, it looks like she's getting close . . .

Pattern Recognition

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