Thumbs up for Pattern Recognition by William Gibson. Science fiction.
Cayce Pollard is, literally, allergic to brands and logos. The story that she’s drawn into is also a little different, but believable as a current-day sci-fi concept: Someone has been releasing tantalizing scenes of a film on the Internet, in random order, and Cayce is drawn into the search for the maker, about whom absolutely nothing is known. I’m glad I picked this up right after I finished Neuromancer (my review). Neuromancer, as I said in my review, is a book I admired rather than enjoyed. But I loved Pattern Recognition. It had all of the gorgeous qualities of its big brother – the creativity, the stunning (if icy) prose, the intense movie-vividness – but the things that kept me from really liking Neuromancer (the head-scratching plot, the fact that I didn’t care about Case, the never-faltering sense of This Is Very Serious Must Not Even Crack A Smile) are absent here. Don’t get me wrong, Pattern Recognition is the kind of book that most readers would hate or go huh? over. And I wouldn’t blame you if you did either. You have to be really freaking geeky. But if there’s any chance you think you might be geeky enough to love it like I did, you should read it now, because with all of its up-to-the-minute (in 2003) coolness, it’s going to date, as my coworker would say, hella fast. (Hotmail anyone? No? Didn’t think so.) Go forth.
The only thing Cayce enjoys about Bigend is that he seems to have no sense at all that his name might seem ridiculous to anyone, ever. Otherwise, she would find him even more unbearable than she already does.
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