Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

Finished this novel by Gibson today. One of the key premises is that the protagonist, Cayce Pollard, has this ability to recognize patterns as the title suggests, where she utilizes it in her day job of marketing and finding trends. Part of the reading of this ability is masking or extending Gibson's view of sociology, which is name dropping. A good portion of the writing here is heavily detailed in the environments, but specifically goes after buzzwords, kinda like the way marketing and businesses shoot off neologisms at every turn. Another interesting aspect of this book is that it really is Gibson's first crack at writing something contemporary. You can pinpoint the timeframe just with the 9/11 reference alone. He works that aspect into the book with Cayce's father disappearing mysteriously near that scene, a sort of epiphany or condolensce from Gibson to the unheralded victims of 9/11. However, one thing that I'd like to say about the book's writing is that technology and the world has caught up to Gibson such that he can utilize our current setting for his material. The globalization aspect, WWW, google, ebay, hotmail, everything that a sci-fi writer could desire is right here at this moment, ready to be exploited. Tons of stories just from reading the news can conjure up a sci-fi/postmodern praxis.