There are four things about William Gibson's Pattern Recognition that I want to talk about, but I don't know how interesting they are and I don't know who to talk to about them. But they're interesting to me. Spoilers abound. If you know of anyone else talking about similar things, please email me or comment here.
The first thing is that Gibson's novels have the same general plot. General plot as in "heist goes wrong" or "boy-meets-girl-boy-loses-girl-boy-gets-girl-back", although I'm sure I can't sum it up that well. It is:
The protagonist is enlisted by massive forces to struggle against another facet of those massive forces.Maybe it's not the primary plot of every novel, but it certainly happens in every one of them. And there are other details that are repeated. I think that this is intentional.
He has pointed out that his books aren't really about the future. Gibson as quoted by George Kelly:
Nothing I've ever written has had anything to do with the future, the real future, because it's impossible to write about the real future. I've always been writing about the time, I have always been reacting to the time that I was writing in, and posing it within the mutual cultural conceit of science fiction, which is that these events are taking place in the future. Therefore it's safe. In a way, my function has been before to provide the reader with oven mitts with which to pick up and examine an unthinkable and terrifying present. Not really the future. But as long as the reader can say "Oh, this is the future. Whoa! This is scary," then we can talk about scary things and not be scared. I think that's what I've always been consciously always been doing...Neuromancer (1984) was about mirrorshades and cybernetics and capitalism. I think Gibson pointed out that All Tomorrow's Parties (1999) that the title was about the millenium, despite being set considerably afterwards. So Pattern Recognition was set in late 2002 but it's really really about late 2002. I'm not used to fiction that is so extremely bound to such a narrow time period. Dunno if you should call that dated or historical, but it felt like a time capsule even when it was published in 2003.
I think that the reason he no longer needed to set his novel in the future isn't just because the present is strange enough, but because he could find all of the elements he needed to retell the plot he always uses. He no longer needed to reach into the future to bring back a story about a massive inhuman power crushing the protagonist in an effort to resolve something about itself. He didn't need "AI" because he could use capitalist Russia.
The third thing is that he is still on the "nodal points" theme from the bridge trilogy. Now it is not supernatural. Rather than nodal points having powers only visible to a ~psychic, the nodal point is imagined by the main character, and it doesn't matter if it's real or not. The bridge trilogy starts at one nodal point which I forget, and ends when the Idoru walks out of all the 7-11s. Pattern recognition begins with the rose petal sequence and ends when the capitalists meet themselves, both of which are recognized by Cayce as pivotal moments. Graciously, Gibson gave us a happy ending even though the book was pretty much already over. I guess he's done that in the past too.
Gibson has continued term dropping like his ordinary sci-fi, even though this novel is set in the present. The result is fucking awesome. The old style Gibson jargon is, charitably, about cultural immersion and gritty realism. Less charitably, it's about posing & in-crowds & barriers to entry. The new Gibson jargon is definitely about cultural immersion, but now it's our culture that we're being immersed in, and boy does that feel like home. If the jargon delineates an in-crowd, it's not one of Gibson's invention. And I hope we don't look too uninviting.
- Ben (judgmentalist@gmail.com) Wednesday, November 30, 2005