Pattern Recognition

By:


I spent about a week getting to know the characters in William Gibson's most recent novel and first book placed in "the recent past" or "near future". Although the story built itself up quite well, it ended rather abruptly -- Gibson spent much of the time creating and developing the characters and their relationships, which in the end made the book a worthwhile read.

William Gibson, one of the 'founding fathers' of the cyberpunk sub-genre of sci-fi, gave a recent interview about Pattern Recognition and apophenia. He defines apophenia from the book as:

Gibson's previous works were usually set in a dark future. This book does an excellent job of setting the reader up in the character's world, which is essentially the high-tech, consumer driven society of today. This isn't the first time Gibson worked in the present though, one of my favorite X-Files episodes, Kill Switch, was co-written by him. You can find out more about Gibson by delving into his own musings on his blog.

Pattern Recognition, centers on Cayce (pronounced 'case') Pollard, a 'coolhunter' -- someone who sees patterns in society before they more clearly emerge and can detect concepts before they enter the meme. Professionally she hunts cool and works as a marketing consultant using her "special condition" to steer companies in the right direction. Cayce is also a devout fan of 'the footage', a series of short film segments of (presumably) a larger work that keep appearing on the Internet. With her online friends, she discusses what the footage means, where its from, and anything else dealing with strange and compelling films.

While working and playing in modern day England as a consultant to the Blue Ant marketing firm she meets the president of the firm, Hubertus Bigend. Once her consulting gig is complete, Bigend convinces Cayce to take a special assignment, tracking down the maker of the footage. Bigend is *very* interested in this new "marketing technique" that the footage is employing -- he wants to commercialize it. Using her new expense account, Cayce teams up with some old and new friends and trots about the globe unraveling the trail that leads to the maker of the footage.

One of the clues that emerges from the investigation is a watermarking technique called steganography. Cayce learns that each segment of the footage is watermarked (invisible unless decoded properly) with a series of numbers. The maker can use these encoded numbers to scour the Internet and track where the film segments have been.

Steganography really exists today -- it can be used to encode a message *inside* another message.

In the case of our friends, the RIAA, they are attempting to use it to watermark CDs and music with trademark information.

Another not-too-far-fetched idea put forth in the novel is the idea that marketing companies pay people to go into society and "talk up" a particular product, movie, or even idea. One of characters explains how she gets briefed and instructed to go to a certain club or bar. Once there she's to casually bring up 'the product' and start conversations with people. She's then debriefed afterwards. This seems like a marketing scheme that could very well be in use today.

I enjoyed the characters in Pattern Recognition and I hope this is just the first book of one of Gibson's trilogies.