Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson

Pattern Recognition is a book about the Internet written in 2003. It tells the story of what happens when marketing and chat room communities collide- in essence, it takes on the ethics and influence of social media years before the term existed.

“Gibson has delivered what is assuredly one of the first authentic and vital novels of the twenty-first century,” said the Washington Post Book World. And they were right. But I put that quote in there for two reasons: First, the curious center-point to the three written medias most important in the history of, well, every kind of information: the book, the newspaper and the Internet. Here is a newspaper commenting on a sci-fi book that is talking about the emerging world of the Internet. Interesting. Second, because the reviewer used the term authentic. It’s interesting to hear a sci-fi writer write a book that gets described as authentic. Sure, Gibson is more of a near-future sci-fi writer, but still- it’s that kind of haunting accuracy that makes this book so good, even 7 years later. You can forgive the ancient-sounding computer apparatus, the lack of smartphones, and even the fact that the main character has a hotmail email address (a what???). Gibson nails everything that counts. The things that are missing are the exceptions that prove the brilliant rule.  

The storyline is convoluted in how it plays out and yet simple in its basic structure. The main character, Cayce Pollard, is a “coolhunter”. Her job is to find and understand the things that huge corporations want to know- what will people want to buy next season. For this she is paid large sums of money. Her one private escape is a chat room organized around a mysterious set of movie clips floating around the Internet. You can already see how the money and the job will encroach on the personal life- and it does. Things get international and messy, deeply philosophical and disturbingly spot on as to how people try to use the Internet now just a few years later. I hope William Gibson writes a book about things like Foursquare (location-based micro-blogging… never mind) and tells a story with tools like Skype.

It’s fast-paced and has fun, believable dialogue. There are twists and turns in every chapter, as Gibson is a storyteller who knows both how to hold your attention and keep you guessing without blowing the storyline or getting too far off track. 

Read it because it is a good story, and read it because Gibson is a talented writer. But also read it because it is a reminder that what we are all running around doing now was thought of as the future less than a decade ago- it reminds you that we are living out a sort of pattern even now, as we hyper-accelerate into the future. Gibson reminds us that we are doing the same things with new toys, that we are bound to wrestle with our ethics no matter how jet-setting we become, and that the Internet does not change anything but the playing field. The game is still the same.

Photo Credit: Myles! (via Flickr under CCL)