Pattern Recognition (novel)
Gibson, William. Pattern Recognition. NYC: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 2003. First book in The Blue Ant trilogy.[1] See Internet Speculative Fiction Database for translations, reprints, and reviews, at link, as of October 2022, here.[2]
See SFS 100 for three discussions of the novel: by Veronica Hollinger, Christopher Palmer, and Neil Easterbrook; full text of issue linked here. [3]
The genre of Pattern Recognition is instructively in dispute, with much to be said for Veronica Hollinger's seeing it as SF situated in a "technocultural future-present."[4] We'll apply Thomas P. Dunn's somewhat flippant but useful term "near-in science fiction." If the far-out varieties look in the far future to "Day Million" or beyond, and take as setting large portions of our galaxy or one far, far away, the near-in variety are in what's recognizably our culture and feature what Darko Suvin has called a novum[5] and others have called "one big lie." Relevant because it deals in textiles and "the rag trade"[6] even more than in Pattern Recognition, we will note THE MAN IN THE WHITE SUIT as an elegant example of a film that lacks the look and feel of SF but is close to the near-in variety by tracing carefully (and comically) the cultural effects — social, economic, political — of one technological breakthrough in a nearly perfect fabric. It is significant that Pattern Recognition as SF (if it is) is SF without a central technological breakthrough but in part because set in a "technoculture" that is our own and which we rarely notice. Also that Pattern Recognition is SF (if it is SF) that examines not a fabric and textile technology, but fashion and logos and branding — the protagonist has a kind of allergy to logos and a "phobia towards older corporate mascots:[7] the semiotics, so to speak, of fashion, not material technology.
Note well handling of earlier 20th-c. technology: the ingenious Curta calculator,[8] a Stuka dive-bomber,[9] the Sinclair Research ZX81 early home computer.[10]
For advertising, cf. and emphatically contrast handling of the advertising business in the very-near-future, but future, world of Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants.
A film version is noted by IMDb and IMDb-Pro as "In Development."[11][12]
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Veronica Hollinger's final words in her section on Pattern Recognition are, "The rate of technological transformation continues to increase incrementally and the fact of change becomes the defining feature of the present. Science fiction’s founding assumption — that the future will be different from the present — has become outdated. Today the present is different from the present (p. 465). And in few stories is this epitomized more emphatically than in Pattern Recognition (except, perhaps, in some areas, later in the 21st century, that rate of transformation in the technoculture may rise moderately exponentially, but exponentially).[13]
RDE, finishing, 25Oct22, 27Oct22