Cayce Pollard is an expensive, spookily intuitive market-research consultant. In London on a job, she is offered a secret assignment: to investigate some intriguing snippets of video that have been appearing on the Internet. An entire subculture of people is obsessed with these bits of footage, and anybody who can create that kind of brand loyalty would be a gold mine for Cayce's client. But when her borrowed apartment is burgled and her computer hacked, she realizes there's more to this project than she had expected.
Still, Cayce is her father's daughter, and the danger makes her stubborn. Win Pollard, ex-security expert, probably ex-CIA, took a taxi in the direction of the World Trade Center on September 11 one year ago, and is presumed dead. Win taught Cayce a bit about the way agents work. She is still numb at his loss, and, as much for him as for any other reason, she refuses to give up this newly weird job, which will take her to Tokyo and on to Russia. With help and betrayal from equally unlikely quarters, Cayce will follow the trail of the mysterious film to its source, and in the process will learn something about her father's life and death.
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William Gibson is credited with being responsible for giving us the word "cyberspace” and the sub-genre "cyberpunk,". In Pattern Recognition he moves into the mainstream fiction world.
Set in the present, Pattern Recognition is an expert snapshot of modern consumer culture. Set in London, Tokyo, and Moscow, Pattern Recognition takes the reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archaeologists, washed-out spies, and our heroine Cayce Pollard--a soothsaying "cool hunter" with an allergy to brand names.
Cayce is the daughter of a security consultant, Win Pollard, who was apparently last seen taking a cab in the direction of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. Although Win is presumed dead in the terrorist attack or its aftermath, Cayce and her mother are having a hard time getting the insurance company to settle their claims. Since there was no body, Cayce still hasn't been able to grieve for her father.
Somewhere out on the World Wide Web someone has been releasing bits of film footage. And, as always happens on the Net, a whole community springs up around this footage. Whole websites are created, theories are advanced, heated arguments are entered into over its origin, meaning, and even sequence. Cayce is as eager as anyone else to discover the secrets behind the fragments of footage, but lacks the means, until the head of Blue Ant hires her to do just that. It is, he says, the most brilliant marketing strategy ever conceived. Now with the means to go wherever she likes, Cayce sets off in search of the origin of the footage, despite some reservations about her employer’s intentions.
All up, this is a great book. The plot is reminiscent of something in the detective or action / adventure genre than sci-fi, but there are enough high tech scenes to mark this as a true William Gibson story. If you’ve read any of his previous books, you will definitely enjoy this. If you haven’t read any of his other books, read this, and you’ll want more.