William Gibson‘s Pattern Recognition came out at the beginning of pop culture’s paranoia phase, not long after 9/11. This captures the era really well. The sudden penetration of the web into everyone’s life, the conspicuous consumption and weird pre-social media web marketing tactics, and the way that foreign places still felt foreign before smartphones.
Gibson always writes in an almost hostile way – the first 75 pages of any one of his books feels like you’ve been dropped into the middle of a conversation between people younger, cooler and way smarter than you are – but once you kind of crack the code, it’s a lot of fun.
This story was a little flimsier than his other books, but really, Gibson writes about culture and ideas, not so much stories, and by that measure this is way more accessible than the books that came before and after.
Loved it.
Pattern Recognition by William Gibson
