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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

New Gibson: "Pattern Recognition"

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02:10 / 04.01.03

...apparently partially set in Camden...

Five hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.

It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.

Not even food, as Damien's new kitchen is as devoid of edible content as its designers' display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.

(Read more excerpt)

According to the Slashdot thread, "people" are saying it's the best in years, though it's also the only one in years.

Anyone read the review version that it is said has been going round?

Regrettable Juvenilia

09:46 / 04.01.03

There seems to be a bit of self-parody going on here, and I hope it's deliberate - people only ever have names like Cayce Pollard in William Gibson novels, and he must know this by now. It also seems strangely reminiscent of Easton Elli's Glamorama... Gibson's work does seem to contain more humour these days...

12:09 / 05.01.03

I find the idea of an identikit jet-lagged Gibson protagonist waking up in Camden .. completely hysterical for some reason..

yawn - thing's buddy

14:57 / 06.01.03

And is that Cacye as in 'Case'?

cos that would be parody innit?

14:25 / 09.01.03

William Gibson has a new weblog. Took his time there...

01:53 / 07.02.03

It's out now in Canada! (and I'm assuming the USA too). I've only made it half a page in, but it was a good half a page!

07:51 / 07.02.03

You bastard!!

uh, sorry....

*drops work, sprints to Waterstones, looks round, cries, curses Canadians*i

15:52 / 07.02.03

Review by Rudy Rucker

06:00 / 08.02.03

Anyone know when it's softcovering?

uncle retrospective

07:08 / 08.02.03

Well it's not out in the UK till the 24 of April according to Amazon.
Arse.

12:13 / 10.02.03

I'm about 50 pages in, and it rocks. Maybe it's because it's not set in the future, with Gibson's fun technologies and gadgets, but the book just seems better written and less silly than his others.

18:39 / 11.02.03

This book is fucking amazing.

I've been describing it as "The best novel ever written by man."

It's, I don't know - a summation of the ideas that have made his novels great, without the crutch of gunfights or noiresque plots. It's also got the most delicate and responsible use of September 11 I've seen yet, and...

god.

I don't know how to talk about this book except to gush. Other than to say, Gibson is describing, in it, a modern world inhabited by people who all seem, to me, like the kind of people who read Neuromancer when they were 12, and who live in a world shaped by it. Which strikes me as strange.

19:57 / 11.02.03

Hmm. May just have to order this ahead of time, from the US...

12:49 / 03.03.03

i've been reading it at the bookstore, and i'm totally hooked. too bad i'm too broke to buy the HC.

it's really striking me as a revisit of the Marly Krushkhova arc from Count Zero, re-imagined and breathlessly interwoven into the contemporary world. since the Marly arc is my favorite Gibson work ever, i'm ecstatic.

01:37 / 05.03.03

I've been "away" from the forum for a long, long time. Cant' remember the last time I posted, though I skim through the threads occasionally.
Anyway, I just bought the book and I devoured it. It was kinda tough decision cause I bought "All tomorrow's parties" (signed by the man himself) but I hated it.

What a surprise, now.

So the book gave me a nudge and said "hey, you know a forum with some people as weird as these. So give it a go, write something"

So I am. I think the book's great. I'm not a lit student, so sometimes I like to discuss books with people who have fresh insights and different ideas about them. I'd like to try with this book. It deserves it. It's not too pretensious, it doesn't hold the secret of life amid its pages, but it gives us a worldview, a perspective.

Thoughts, then?

- Mercury

01:55 / 05.03.03

Well, I thought the footage was a lot like the actual publicity campaign for the movie a.i., and raised a lot of the same hidden creator issues back when it was going on.

The idea of taking your jeans to a locksmith in Chinatown to have the logos sanded off the buttons strikes me as so brilliant. I was crushed, when I read it, that I hadn't thought of it first.

Those those F:F:F people seem very familiar - as do the rest of the characters - but I suppose that sort of makes sense, given where we are.

Everyone I know who's read it wants to make the footage happen. Wants to start releasing quicktime short films. I'm waiting patiently to make the forum that annotates the film happen.

18:38 / 05.03.03

It's very much self parody, Fly. The Cayce bit is obvious and he even calls to it a couple times. At another point he likens the sky to "a gray-scale Cibachrome of a Turner print." It's evocative if you're familiar with the capitals, but I found myself laughing out loud at the casual reference to Neuromancer and Count Zero buried in there.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

21:22 / 05.03.03

I so can't wait for this.

11:29 / 06.03.03

Re: making footage

http://www.momentfactory.com

http://www.entropy8zuper.com

17:18 / 06.03.03

http://www.entropy8zuper.com doesn't seem to exist.

The Brian Eno thing looks rocking, though.

21:24 / 06.03.03

I really haven't read Gibson for a while. And on this book I noticed that whole fetishing with ancient stuff, the clothes, the design, the Curtas, the Zxs, etc.

I remembered an interview he gave Wired about his fascination with ebay and collecting watches.

This coming up in PatRecog: you think it's some sort of message, a concept he wanted to explore, or simply WG putting his own hobbies and fantasies on the book?

- Mercury

21:50 / 06.03.03

The watch thing featured heavily in All Tomorrow's Parties. I remember thinking about the Wired bit as I read the book. It actually seemed toned down in PR by comparrison; aside from actually naming eBay.

I think it's something of a combination of "write what you know" and his simply thinking that his hobbies are cool. The early books and short stories had excessive video game imagery. Now he's a little older and likes collecting things.

It's also well explored in his work. Characters' living or working spaces and possessions are almost overdeveloped. The things people surround themselves with, in Gibson, define them more than pesky personality traits and whatnot. Or, alternatively, buttress whatever traits are offered.

00:44 / 07.03.03

.org .

I meant to say .org .
http://entropy8zuper.org

Which, on further reflection, isn't footage at all, rather it's really well done Flash and Director work.

22:57 / 16.03.03

I want to mirror what's been said upthread and say I love this book. It hits where I am or my friends are on so many points... in a lot of ways it's like a book someone I know should have written, but it was somehow out of reach.

I'm not saying that to sound conceited, just to describe how familiar it all seems. Familiar in the best, best way.

I'm halfway through and I want a sequel already, something I can start right after I finish this.

17:41 / 18.03.03

I finished it yesterday at work. Amazing.

Not a spoiler, but what made it even better was the 'special thanks to' on the last page, just because he thanks Douglas Coupland for showing him around Japan. I want to see a book about the two of them running around Tokyo.... and maybe visiting Leonard Cohen in his Buddhist monastary...

18:35 / 18.03.03

I have this fantasy that Maxis, on the release of the next Sim City, give advance copies to celebrities and then include their cities as models of what you can do.

I want to see Douglad Coupland, William Gibson, and David Byrne build habitable spaces.

And, while I've been aware for a long time that two of these three people lived in Vancouver, it was somehow reassuring to see evidence that they know each other.

13:45 / 19.03.03

Coupland and Gibson hanging out in Tokyo (with Michael Stipe to boot) is touched on here

22:58 / 19.03.03

I finished it yesterday. Have enough people read it to start having a discussion? Maybe a new thread is needed with a big SPOILER warning?

23:25 / 19.03.03

Or just go:

S

P

O

I

L

E

R

S

20:17 / 21.03.03

William Gibson? I prefer Dave Gibson personally.

20:39 / 21.03.03

Rakehell - go ahead in this thread, with spoilers as Bazza suggests, and I'll stick spoiler warnings in the title. That should do it nicely...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

07:10 / 22.03.03

Before spoilage begins...
if any London 'lithers can't wait (and I hate to advertise the fuckers, but here goes) Forbidden Planet have some of the US edition. I bought one yesterday, and so far it's fucking amazing.
It's kind of a weird read, though- with the last three, I was constantly having to remind myself that this was the future, because it was so close to contemporary reality.
Now I keep having to remind myself that this is not only when I live, it's where I live. I'm currently seeing Clerkenwell through a whole different set of eyes.
And the line "The site had come to feel like a second home, but she'd also known it was a fishbowl; it felt like a friend's living room, but it was a sort of text-based broadcast, available in its entirety to anyone who cared to access it." kind of summed up everything I've felt about this place.

11:39 / 22.03.03

Well, that's me down Forbidden Planet tomorrow then.

16:36 / 22.03.03

Pattern Recognition says a lot about Barbelith, at its best, and sort of at its worst.

But (SPOILER)

But Then again, in Pattern Recognition, Trolls and fictionsuit disputes happen because the Troll is secretly working for the russian mafia.

God, I love this book. I think I want to read it again.

nedrichards is confused

12:23 / 25.03.03

Tends to underestimate the possibility that the barbelith trolls are also working for the russian mafia. It all suddenly makes sense...

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