William Gibson's new novel, Pattern Recognition, seems set in the present, or at least a present much more recognizable as such than the futures in his earlier novels, like Neuromancer. As one of the grandfathers of the science fiction sub-genre cyperpunk, Gibson is easily one of the most gifted writers of our age. His turns of phrase not only evoke in the reader remarkable inner pictures of strange times and places ("The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" - the very first sentence in Neuromancer), but as these sentences sum into paragraphs and chapters, we not only have a vision of the future, but know it as mood, as if it had a soul-taste all its own.

In Pattern Recognition, Gibson's gift has continued to mature. Sentences are frequently more like poetry and the mood/images they evoke bring us not only the sense of the time (the present?) in a unique way, but give to the human struggle, of living in a state of constant future shock, new and attractive dimensions.

His main character sees the world from a place that some might see as a kind of illness - she gets sick upon seeing certain corporate logos and other aspects of our commercial culture. But this sensitivity to design art, she turns into a gift, finding work as someone ad agencies hire to test their future designs. Her intuitions and over-sensitivities to the commercial art that adorns much that surrounds us in modern civilization, becomes instead a kind of natural seer-ship - she arrives at knowledge of the world, knowledge much deeper and all the more accurate for its subtle feeling texture, as if she sees not just the surface of the effect of commerce upon our civilization, but its most inward nature.

To further his themes, Gibson then places his heroine into the center of a journey, seeking after an ongoing mystery in the world of art film, only slowly being revealed frame by frame over time on the internet. From this substance then Gibson leads us forth into a poetic meditation on art, creativity, culture and human nature as it faces the on rush of changes we can't even manage today, much less tomorrow. Originally posted January 05, 2003.