{"id":812,"date":"2003-09-28T17:53:27","date_gmt":"2003-09-28T17:53:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sunpig.com\/mt-entry-812.html"},"modified":"2006-12-30T16:27:18","modified_gmt":"2006-12-30T16:27:18","slug":"william-gibson-pattern-recognition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/2003\/09\/28\/william-gibson-pattern-recognition\/","title":{"rendered":"William Gibson &#8211; <i>Pattern Recognition<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter, a woman with an instinct for the next big thing, and an allergy to excessive branding.  She is also a dedicated follower of something called &#8220;the footage,&#8221; a mysterious series of film fragments that someone, somewhere, is posting on the web.  No-one knows who they are, what they mean, or even if the clips are from a finished film or a work in progress.  While working on a big job involving a major corporate rebranding, Cayce gets persuaded to find out where the footage is coming from.<\/p>\n<p>Although the hunt for the footage makes for a fine plot, driving the action from London to Tokyo to Moscow, it&#8217;s really Cayce herself, and the people she meets that make the book more than a simple mystery thriller.  (Which is just as well, because the ending suffers from Sidelined Protagonist Syndrome, although not as much as, say, Greg Bear&#8217;s <i>Vitals<\/i>.)  Hubertus Bigend, the charming entrepreneur; Parkaboy, the enthusiastic footagehead she interacts with via forum and email; Voytek, the artist who collects old ZX-81 computers; Dorotea, the &uuml;ber-bitch designer and former industrial &eacute;spion; and so many more.  <\/p>\n<p>Gibson&#8217;s prose is smooth like Belgian chocolate, and cool like an Armani glacier.  The last third of the book is more plot-driven than character-driven, but <i>Pattern Recognition<\/i> is never less than a delight to read.  Each page is an adventure, each sentence a treat.  Exceedingly worthwhile.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Cayce Pollard is a cool hunter, a woman with an instinct for the next big thing, and an allergy to excessive branding. She is also a dedicated follower of something called &#8220;the footage,&#8221; a mysterious series of film fragments that someone, somewhere, is posting on the web. No-one knows who they are, what they mean, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[1142],"class_list":["post-812","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books_4_stars","tag-legendshome"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=812"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/812\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=812"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=812"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sunpig.com\/quickreviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=812"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}