Gibson warms tech tale with sentimentality, plot

Jay Pawlowski, Special To The News

Tuesday, February 25, 2003

In the world of marketing and advertising, nobody's cooler than Cayce Pollard. Her intuition for fashion trends affords her a comfortable lifestyle as a free-lance "coolhunter" and consultant.

It's a job that lands her in the web of paranoia, secrets and corporate espionage that is Pattern Recognition, the new novel by cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson.

Cayce's gift comes at a heavy price. She suffers from a strange allergy to brand names and corporate logos that causes panic and physical sickness. Cayce uses this malady to her advantage in her professional life, but she removes all tags and emblems from her personal belongings.

This paradox fuels Pattern Recognition's main theme, which pits commercialism against personal and artistic integrity. When Hubertus Bigend, CEO of the marketing firm Cayce works for, hires her to find the source of mysterious film clips posted on the Internet known only as "the footage" - which has spawned its own subculture of fanatics who scour the Web for new postings and obsess over their meaning in newsgroups - Cayce finds herself struggling between Bigend's seemingly profit-driven motives and her own obsession with the footage and its enchanting, noncommercial beauty.

The job proves difficult and dangerous. The creator or creators of the footage certainly don't want to be found, and it isn't just the computer-geek "footageheads" who have an interest in its source. Cayce runs into Italian gangsters, the Russian Mafia and a plethora of hackers and deceivers.

Cayce (pronounced "Case") is instantly likable, and she only gets cooler as the novel speeds on. Her sense of humor, sharp tongue and technical savvy are typical of Gibson's protagonists, but her awareness of her own insecurities - and especially her heartfelt reflection on the day her father apparently died - make her unforgettable.

Pattern Recognition marks a new era for Gibson, whose droves of fans have come to expect technologically augmented cyborgs, sentient computers and extremely fragmented narratives from his books. This novel isn't so much science fiction as it is literary tech noir, still reveling in high technology but adding a deeper layer of sentimentality and a plot that hits closer to home.

Cyberpunk purists may scoff, but Gibson's surprising move toward the mainstream has made him an even better writer. And he hasn't lost any of his cool.

Jay Pawlowski is a free-lance writer living in Denver.