Pattern Recognition (novel)
Pattern Recognition is a novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003. Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols. The action takes place in London, Tokyo, and Moscow as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet.
Original first edition cover
Book covers for the (top left to right) North American (paperback), British (hard cover), British (paperback), Dutch, French, (bottom left to right) Spanish, Portuguese, German, Japanese, and Polish releases
William Ford Gibson is an American-Canadian speculative fiction writer and essayist widely credited with pioneering the science fiction subgenre known as cyberpunk. Beginning his writing career in the late 1970s, his early works were noir, near-future stories that explored the effects of technology, cybernetics, and computer networks on humans, a "combination of lowlife and high tech"—and helped to create an iconography for the information age before the ubiquity of the Internet in the 1990s. Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" for "widespread, interconnected digital technology" in his short story "Burning Chrome" (1982), and later popularized the concept in his acclaimed debut novel Neuromancer (1984). These early works of Gibson's have been credited with "renovating" science fiction literature in the 1980s.
Gibson in 2008
William S. Burroughs at his 70th birthday party in 1984. Burroughs, more than any other beat generation writer, was an important influence on the adolescent Gibson.
Gibson at a 2007 reading of Spook Country in Victoria, British Columbia. Since "The Winter Market" (1985), commissioned by Vancouver Magazine with the stipulation that it be set in the city, Gibson actively avoided using his adopted home as a setting until Spook Country.
The San Francisco–Oakland Bay Bridge, a fictional squatted version of which constitutes the setting for Gibson's Bridge trilogy