56. Pattern Recognition by William Gibson

Another pick-up from S.W. Welch's last days, I thought that I had already read this, but once I was about a third of the way through I realized it was new to me.  I kind of messed myself up by stopping reading Gibson and then picking up books at random much later.  I would have rather read them in order, simply to keep track of which ones I've read.  All his post sci-fi books that I have read have been really good, but their narratives are not clearly delineated nor easily remembered with time (they tend to be cool girl and other neat characters are trying to find something that they don't know what it is). His books are grouped into trilogies but not because of a narrative through line but just shared time and place and some characters.  Now that I have "rediscovered" Gibson and enjoy his later books, I have them on my hunting list and am going to try and read them in order.

Pattern Recognition is Gibson's 9/11 novel. The story goes that he was almost finished with it when the planes hit and was going to abandon it when his editor convinced him to re-write it to incorporate the new world.  I resist the idea that "9/11 changed everything" because it is so annoyingly American and self-centered, but two decades later, I can see that there is a lot of validity to it.  Pattern Recognition puts 9/11 in the back story, the protagonist's father who worked for the CIA but had retired, disappeared on that day after checking out from a hotel in lower Manhattan.  The main plot is about her working as a consultant for an elite advertising/marketing agency called Blue Ant and its powerful, charismatic, manipulative and morally ambiguous Belgian boss named Bigend.  She has a unique skill/flaw in that she is allergic to branding and logos and can sniff out a logo that will work or not.  On the side, her main interest is investigating these mysterious snippets of video that are being released to the internet. She is a big part of the internet community (online forums at this stage) that is obsessed with these videos.  The story takes off when Bigend hires her to continue her personal investigation into these video snippets in a professional capacity.

There is a lot going on here.  Gibson explores early internet culture, as well as fashion and street style (one of the characters is a "cool hunter" another a guerrilla marketer hired to be cool and hot and drop references to certain products to men she meets in bars).  The roads slowly lead back to Russia and we get a lot of exploration into post-Soviet collapse and the growth of oligarchs.  It's a testimony to Gibson's vision and style that none of this feels dated.  The content is, but he frames it from an objective stance that both gives you a slice of what was going on then as well as demonstrating how these things laid the foundation for the excessive versions with which we are living in the 2020's.

There is also a real aspirational, wish-fulfillment element in these books that I really enjoy.  They are corporate fantasies, where the protagonist gets the coolest freelance gig ever.  She never has to deal with any administrative or grunt work.  Has access to first-class flights, boutique hotel rooms, limo pickups and elite restaurants where the tab is paid all with a quick phone call to a person whose job is to immediately get you anything you need, including visas, passports, etc.  Her challenges are internal (should she expose her personal and artistic interest in these video snippets to her corporate boss who wants to exploit it for marketing clout?) and political (why does the icy Italian VP seem to want to fuck with her and what should she do about it?).

The goals are ambitious and somehow Gibson wraps it up in a rich, satisfying way.  This is the first book of the so-called Blue Ant trilogy and I've already read the second, so the next on my list is.