[Reading] "Pattern Recognition" - William Gibson

[jordangreywolf]

With the number of trips I've had to take for work as of late, I've taken to digging through some of Gwendel's collection of books (the vast majority of which, I've come to learn, she's never actually read) for something to take along for when I'm stuck in the airport or on a plane, I haven't access to a laptop, and I've no mind to doodle.

My last such book was "Neuromancer," by William Gibson -- quite the trend-setter when it comes to the cyberpunk genre.

I'll admit, when I picked up "Pattern Recognition" to read, I was curious to find out what Gibson's cyberpunk would be like, circa 2003.

It's not cyberpunk, but I can definitely see that it's Gibson. The "voice" is the same, as is a consciousness of the past leading up to the present.

It's not really a thriller, either, even though several events happen that invoke paranoia in the main character, and there are indeed threats. In some senses, the resolution of the "thriller" aspects are disappointing, because there wasn't really so much "there" there ... and I think that's purely intentional.

True to the name of the novel, there are several story sub-threads that play with the concept of the human tendency toward recognizing patterns that may or may not actually be there.

First, the main character (Cayce) has curious "power" and "weakness" is that she has a peculiar psychological hang-up regarding trademark brands, corporate logos and mascots, etc. -- on the one side, she has severe, almost allergic reactions to them (to the point where she carefully removes all signs of branding from her clothes and tries to dress as "generically" as possible, and tends to avoid various places where heavy branding might be found) -- but on the other side, she finds employment as a consultant: She reviews prototypes for new logos, designs, etc., and has (or is BELIEVED to have) an innate sense for whether that particular design taps into something in the "zeitgeist" (my choice of term -- not in the story) that will make it catch on and be successful.

Second, Cayce is a frequenter of forums devoted to a sub-cultural phenomenon known as "The Footage." Basically, there are brief snippets of video that are released on the internet now and again, which appear to be segments from some larger feature film, but nobody can identify it -- and, indeed, even though the film has visible actors and actresses and appears to take place in an urban area, nobody can pin down where it takes place, or even in what time period it might be. (It also happens to be in black-and-white.) A goodly number of the fan following is devoted to tracking releases of these snippets, proposing in what chronological order the film segments might actually be intended to be viewed in, what sort of overall story they might be part of, and prying into all sorts of tiny details for any possible hidden meaning or clues.

A good part of the story is devoted to Cayce's attempts to find out more about the origin of the "Footage." The ultimate "reveal" about its origins has something to say about the phenomenon of "pattern recognition" as well.

Third, Cayce is haunted by the disappearance of her father in New York City during the events of 9/11 in the US. His body is never found, his whereabouts unknown (or even why he was in New York). Cayce's mother looks for whispers of the dead (specifically for voices of Cayce's father) in static of recordings made at Ground Zero. Cayce has dreams of her father trying to tell her things that are very vague and open to interpretation, and which MIGHT be prophetic ... or, again, seeing their fulfillment could just be another example of finding patterns where there are none.

But more than that, the story is fascinating for Gibson's prose. Cayce travels the world, visiting Tokyo, England, Russia, and a few other places along the way, and Gibson has a wonderful way of conveying the sense of place and time, sometimes striking me with an amazing efficiency of words. I recall that from "Neuromancer" as well.

Another Gibson feature I noticed right off was a consciousness of the past that leads up to the present. This is a very LIVED-IN world -- I felt that especially noteworthy for Neuromancer, in that too often I've been used to sci-fi settings where everything is shiny and brand-new, and there's a sense that "the future" just popped into existence one day, with little of note to lead up to it. There were plenty of allusions to obsolescence of prior technologies, re-purposing of buildings in a metropolis (or building pods in a gradually-built-and-expanded-while-lived-in space station), the coming and going of boom-towns, passing of fads, etc. I see that same sensibility here -- that consciousness that the here-and-now has a history leading up to it, and that this world won't reach "the future" and then just stay that way forever, immutable.

One difference between this and Neuromancer? No painfully awful sex scene. Thank goodness. Not that this story is in any way prudish. (Language and content warnings, as appropriate.)

If I'm going to criticize, I think it would be to gingerly criticize on the matter of technology. (And I realize this is getting picky -- the same sort of pickiness that would dissuade me from wanting to write sci-fi of my own, precisely because I know somewhere I'll get the science and tech embarrassingly wrong myself.) Even though Gibson, near as I can tell, involves technologies in all his stories, there seems to be a lot of it he's kind of oblivious to.

In "Neuromancer" -- and it seems to be something inherited by the Cyberpunk genre in general -- there's this sense that a computer program is a distinct THING that has a PLACE in the internet, and it can move from here to there. Your hacking program goes "into" the other system, and might drop a few little modules of code here and there along the way, and when you finish the attack, it has to work its way back out, and pick up those modules along the way -- else, I suppose, you'd lose your program. Don't unplug that cartridge too early!

(That was a big factor in R. Talsorian Games' Cyberpunk RPG, in that a big conceit of being a hacker was that you'd sink a bunch of money into your advanced AI hacking program, and intrusion counter-measures might very well DESTROY your program. Not crash it, requiring a reboot, but the thing is GONE. And, yes, you could get a "backup," as a spare, but that was an expensive and time-consuming process, on par with getting the program in the first place. It also makes me think of Tron, where programs are people, and you can "steal" a banking software program and force it do battle in a gladiatorial arena and be DELETED if it fails. Ack! Never delete anything from a computer again to save hard drive space, because PROGRAMS ARE PEOPLE TOO! ... Ack. Sorry, I digress. ;) These just represent some very EXTREME extrapolations from that sort of mindset.)

Here, in "Pattern Recognition," it's nothing quite so crazy, but there IS a subplot element that involves some "watermarks" embedded on video segments that are being used to track the distribution of the video. And to that, I have to think ... howzat work, exactly? I mean, in one sense, if you release the same video in several different channels, but you want to know, if anyone is sharing it, WHICH one of those channels the person got that film from, then embedding a watermark would be one way to secretly make a slight difference in the film so you can tell which one is which in what otherwise might appear to be an identical document. But the presence of the watermark itself doesn't somehow magically "track" the video. Maybe that's not quite what the author intended to imply, but it would seem that at least one of the characters in the story seems to THINK that's how it works (and if it didn't, surely she would have figured it out by that point).

There are lots of aspects of the book that feel a bit awkward, and somehow the ending feels a little disappointing after all the set-up. (If anything, the "big reveal" of the story I think happens oddly a great deal BEFORE the story ends -- so it's not exactly climactic.) However, it was an enjoyable journey for me, and I'm glad I gave it a try.

Comments

[tuftears]

I can see your point, yeah. I think it's legitimate that a security measure could be associated with a certain firm but you have to make a fair number of assumptions-- say, for example, that it's assumed to be able to READ the clips, you have to be online, because the security firm wrote the copy protection that's used to validate the clips to require online access. And the security firm did that because they earn money by licensing their protection to the publishers who use said media format.

Just *random* watermarks though, I would have significant doubts about the makers being able to identify who'd viewed the clips unless the media players were processing them somehow.