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more thoughts on william gibson's pattern recognition Tracey Ross "Her Sunset Plaza boutique is ground zero for L.A. style. Everyone eventually visits Tracey Ross. Why? Because she's one of those people with perfect pitch for style and cool, a real-life version of William Gibson's heroine in his latest book, Pattern Recognition." Girl lost in Gibson novel "The storyline and images from Ghost Town sounds and looks eerily like the post-meltdown chaos of William Gibson's art imitatiing life novel 'Pattern Recognition.'" Paul Di Filippo review "He actually does nothing different in Pattern Recognition from what he's ever done. It's all there: the close observation of the culture's bleeding edge; an analysis of the ways technology moulds our every moment; the contrasting of boardroom with street; the impossibility and dire necessity of making art in the face of instant co-optation; the damaged loner facing the powers-that-be, for both principle and profit; cyberspace as consensual hallucination. All his patented tropes and concerns are here, without the artifice of futuristic skins, the very world of 1980s cyberpunk having sprung up around us while we weren't paying attention. In other words, everything's changed, while nothing's changed at all." Anne Jolis review "If you can manage to shrug off how painful Gibson's heroine is, read through the Britney Spears-Bill Gates-love-child-with-paranoid-schizophrenia language, and if you can manage to keep track of the smorgasbord of plot lines (most of which are quite gripping, though not, as they say, 'necessary'), you'll have fun. There are some great insights into each of the cities that Pollard visits, a few obscure and fascinating history and CIA lessons to be had, and several genuinely touching scenes. The book covers some engaging philosophical ideas with style and humor as well. With a little concentration, readers are sure to close the book with some new ideas haunting their heads." katla log comments "Honestly, Pattern Recognition was awful but that might not necessarily be an objective statement. I was disappointed by his writing but it was mainly the story I didn't like. The world of advertising is something I am absolutely not interested in. And there's not a lot of the good old Neuromancer geek stuff in there. The main character uses a Hotmail account. How uncool is that?! I don't think I wanted to hear about the exploitation of subcultures and communities for the sake of commercialism. The book is certainly spot on, but it's an uncomfortable topic I just don't want to think about. It certainly describes the present very well, with the Internet being just part of the backdrop, but it's not what I want from William Gibson." Articles and Resources dkennedy reviews "Is PR going to be a classic? I dunno. It's certainly a superb book, but it doesn't shake up the genre in the same way Neuromancer did, and it does have very many ties to the present day - 9/11, iBooks, StarBucks etc, which may serve to tie it too closely to today to last. This however is unfair criticism - an author cannot be expected to re-invent a genre every time he writes; to manage it once is great achievement. This is probably Gibson's best book so far, and that should be enough." The Future of Advertising is in New Media Strategies "In order to allow new media strategies to evolve, one needs to focus on online communities, the bloggosphere (the powerfully new media newspaper organ, the web log), portals, chat rooms, irc, and the next big thing (at least in the USA) in new media strateies is SMS (Short Message Service)." Library of Babel comments "This is the first Gibson novel I can think of where the protagonist isn't a loser. Gibson's other books are characterized by what Bruce Sterling referred to as 'low life and high tech'-- his protagonists in the past have been drug-addicted petty criminals just scraping by, who find themselves caught up in events beyond their comprehension. Cayce Pollard, on the other hand, is definitely upper-middle-class-- she has a comfortable life, hob-nobs with corporate heads and noted film directors, and is a fairly experienced world traveler. It's an odd departure for Gibson, as if he decided to write a novel using Bruce Sterling characters for variety. Or maybe Neal Stephenson characters, as Cayce's violent allergy to corporate branding is a very Snow Crash sort of touch." New! PMLA, May, now available! Whole issue of new PMLA devoted to Sci Fi! According to Gwyneth Jones in the May 2004 issue of PMLA, "In 1984 there was a revolution in science fiction. It involved a book called Neuromancer, by William Gibson, and a manifesto, compiled by Bruce Sterling [Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology], that declared (among other matters) that the rocket-ship fantasies of the 1950s were finally dead, the galactic empires played out. From here on the only true science fiction was to be about the future of now; its hallmarks would be close extrapolation from the present, contemporary referents, political and emotional realism. Labels and brand names would be vital; style would be understood as content; appropriation--scratching, riffing, sampling--would be the palette. It was to be an impressionist literature, where there'd be no attempt (or as little attempt as possible) to smooth out and hide the real world behind the futuristic mask." Peter Weir should cast Heike as Cayce Celebrating the rebirth of psychedelic futurism--again off-topic PR "Scaled Composites launched the first private astronaut Mike Melvill into space. I am so excited! Although it was not as visually spectacular as a Saturn V launch, this milestone cannot be overstated. What makes this event so important is that a bunch of guys in a couple of hangars at a rinky-dink airport in the Mojave desert, with just million in start-up capital launched a man into space. This event is as much a psychological milestone as it is a technological one." Adrian Miles vlog 2.1 also apropos of nada PR Miles, Adrian. "'Singin' in the Rain': A Hypertextual Reading." Postmodern Culture 8.2 (1998). This essay is mirrored at: http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/singing/ great blog apropos of nothing whatsoever to do with Pattern Recognition "'Whoa. Dude,' Starla said in the voice of the turtle from Finding Nemo, 'I don’t know what that was, but it was so uncool, dude.'" Dan Winckler's video blog Ben Shannon's art for Wired review Christopher J. Bradley review "When the subway maps begin to include templates for Claymore mine blast radii and Stegonographic watermarks are discovered in some of the footage, you know things are going to begin to really warp into high gear, the only question is, will you be able to keep up?" DGA Magazine--July 2003 "Gibson's question then becomes: When end-users have access to digital tools that are more intelligent and capable than those used to create original works, and when stories can be hacked in a spontaneous digital cut-and-paste frenzy by just about anyone, how will the role of directors change? Gibson seems to think blurring is inevitable." Read Gibson's entire keynote on his blog-- note: scroll down to the May 21 2003 item UP THE LINE for this speech Sean Merrigan review "Technological high-jinks ensue, with 'digital watermarking' and disgraced encryption scientists, and even a spot of good old-fashioned brawling, as Cayce dispatches a baddie with the time-honoured headbutt. Gibson's masterful grasp of English dust-uppery only fails for a second as she fails to employ the boot-in-the-groin to finish off. All this mayhem builds to a stunning denouement, with Cayce performing a stylish jailbreak and escaping across lethally contaminated Russian steppe whilst addled on ex-KGB truth drugs. Cultural meltdown! Yay!" Jeremy Smith review "Sept. 11 is the apocalypse at the heart of this novel. Gibson describes Cayce's memory of the date in an ironically future-tense passage that mirrors the flames of Fahrenheit 451: Cayce 'will watch the towers burn, and eventually fall, and though she will know she must have seen people jumping, falling, there will be no memory of it. It will be like watching one of her own dreams on television. Some vast and deeply personal insult to any ordinary notion of interiority. An experience outside of culture.'" VIRTUAL REALITY TERMS by Joe Psotka and Sharon Davison Artificial Realities, Virtual Communities, and Knowbots by Chris Dede "The term applied to rich artificial realities for visualizing information is 'cyberspace,' from a science fiction novel by William Gibson (1984). The vision of our civilization a couple decades hence that Gibson presents is both intriguing and plausible. The 'nervous system' of global business is based on workers manipulating huge virtual structures of data in a shared artificial reality; teleoperation (performing activities over distance) and telepresence (mimicking face-to-face contact through video/graphics representations) dominate human activity. Some 'cybernauts' are interested in having life imitate art and are building computational tools that would enable Gibson's imagined future." Christopher Tayler review "Cayce - pronounced 'Case', not 'Casey' - is a spectacularly talented, unerringly prescient branding consultant. A 'dowser in the world of global marketing' with a 'morbid and sometimes violent reactivity to the semiotics of the marketplace', she is employed by advertising companies to evaluate the virulence of their logo designs: 'She's met the very Mexican who first wore his baseball cap backward . . . She's that good.' It's an effortful business, and, it seems, a full-time job, but hardly unusual in William Gibson's futuristic fiction, which often features characters whose sensitivity to ambient data borders on the supernaturally acute." Jerry Brito review "Lot's of the action takes place over e-mail or on a message board. Digital watermarking, rendering, viral marketing, Japanese fashion, and iBooks connected to cell phones, and, of course, the characters empowered by these technologies are what make this book."

Pattern Recognition One Two Three cantos I II III IV V VI VII VIII IX X archives Alka Seltzer Please! Amelie Asa Nisi Masa Attis Big Oops Chuckle! Club of Man Craw Drown Yourself in Garcia Lorca Eros Finney Ordained Fish Grace Green Looking Glass Magnolias Make It Real Many Minds May 2003 Mitochondria Nautilus Raw Information Somme Spellbound Surfing with Philip Thanatos The best job Philip... Triple Chocolate Cake Winter Sounds Time Travel Channel Woodies $ BLOGSHARES $ sites atomFILMS BloggerCon II Critical Mass Crooked Timber deep shag heckler & coch kottke Liliputian Lilith Marshall memory hole Muninn One Good Thing rainy monday in reykjavík Science Blog scripting news Snooze Button Dreams Thoughts Args Rants truth out Udell the_velvet_rut Waypath wil wheaton dot net < ? PoetsUnite # >

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