From Russia with love
Apr. 21st, 2022 01:39 pmI’ve been carrying around this copy of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition since college, when it was on a syllabus and got struck for scheduling reasons. It’s been so long I actually can’t remember which class it was for. I think it was Shaping Fantasies since it doesn’t feature any aliens or AIs. Despite carrying it around for at least ten years, I’ve paid so little attention to it that until I started reading it I couldn’t keep it straight in my head that this was actually a different book than Neuromancer, which I also haven’t read but have been intending to for a very long time.
I will admit I bounced off the style a little bit in the beginning; it’s written in a very detailed, fragment-heavy, brand-name-filled style that I vaguely remember as being more popular at the time it was written (early 2000s) than it is now, and it having gotten some distance from it it annoys me slightly more and differently than the writing tics we’ve got going on in SF/F these days. It bothered me less as I got more into the story, which is a very fun twisty little thriller involving a secretive internet subculture based around obsessing over mysterious scraps of movie footage known only as “the footage,” a lot of rich asshole marketing types, some scary Russian gangsters, and a mysteriously disappeared father (who was also a CIA spook and may or may not have died in the 9/11 attacks).
Our protagonist is once Cayce Pollard, a “coolhunter,” meaning she scouts trends for companies that wish to find and capitalize them. Despite working in marketing she is actually dreadfully allergic to corporate logos; the whole thing works fairly smoothly (if a bit obviously) as a metaphor for how we all feel about corporations trying to advertise to an audience that is tired of advertising, and is not too far off from the actual shit corporations have started doing around content marketing and faux anti-advertising advertising in the 20 years since this book has been written. It also partly works because Cayce’s cool-hunting superpower, which allows her to get paid handsomely to just people-watch and look at new logo designs–a modern power fantasy if there ever was one–is balanced out by the fact that she has An Actual Phobia of the Michelin Man. This is a bit where the writing style annoyed me a bit; due to her sensitivities Cayce only wears very plain minimalist clothes in white, black, and gray, with no logos, and even has to cut all the tags out (a thing I did a bit of in my ineffectual lifestylist days), but the close third-person narration–a stream-of-consciousness that is clearly supposed to be Cayce’s consciousness–still relentlessly refers to absolutely everything by brand name every single time. The plain black Fruit of the Loom T-shirts that Cayce buys because those are the most standard, generic black T-shirts on the market and then picks the tags out of so that she is not ever assaulted by having to see the “Fruit of the Loom” logo never, ever, not once, over the course of the entire narration, become plain black T-shirts; they remain “Fruits” on every mention. This is probably a very deep and intentional narrative choice, but as someone who also hates logos I found it just as annoying to read as I do to listen to when people actually talk like that.
Anyway, after some shenanigans with a marketing company called Blue Ant wherein she is called upon to evaluate a logo redesign and somebody breaks into the borrowed apartment she’s staying in, Blue Ant’s head honcho, an annoying rich guy named Hubertus Bigend, hired her for a secret detective assignment to find the makers of the mysterious footage that Cayce and a bunch of other weirdos on the internet are obsessed with. Cayce has mixed feelings about this because rich guys like Bigend are interested in grassroots phenomena like this usually for the express purpose of commodifying them, which obviously sucks ass on principle, even if Cayce can’t figure out what Bigend would actually do with this knowledge if he found out. With the help and sometimes sabotage of a motley assortment of secondary characters, including some collectors of historical calculators, some fellow weirdos from a forum dedicated to discussing the footage, a dot-com bust guy that Bigend assigns her to work with, and the occasional hallucination of her mysteriously-disappeared-on-9/11 former-CIA-officer father, Cayce gets into and out of various scrapes and jet-sets all around the world (London, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris) and buys increasingly expensive gray and black clothes and basically networks her way into finding out what is going on–solving this mystery uses basically zero of her cool-hunting skills but lots of her willingness to pass information back and forth and use Blue Ant’s expense account to bribe her non-Blue-Ant-affiliated miscreant contacts into doing what she wants them to do.
Overall it was a fun techno-thriller and as a reader I enjoyed jet-setting dangerously around the world with Cayce and her affinity group of rich assholes and tech nerds to solve this mystery, even if the final clue proved a bit too easy. I hope Cayce’s wealthy benefactors get her a third (!!) fancypants bomber jacket (fun fact: this jacket did not exist in black when the book was published, but now it does).
I will admit I bounced off the style a little bit in the beginning; it’s written in a very detailed, fragment-heavy, brand-name-filled style that I vaguely remember as being more popular at the time it was written (early 2000s) than it is now, and it having gotten some distance from it it annoys me slightly more and differently than the writing tics we’ve got going on in SF/F these days. It bothered me less as I got more into the story, which is a very fun twisty little thriller involving a secretive internet subculture based around obsessing over mysterious scraps of movie footage known only as “the footage,” a lot of rich asshole marketing types, some scary Russian gangsters, and a mysteriously disappeared father (who was also a CIA spook and may or may not have died in the 9/11 attacks).
Our protagonist is once Cayce Pollard, a “coolhunter,” meaning she scouts trends for companies that wish to find and capitalize them. Despite working in marketing she is actually dreadfully allergic to corporate logos; the whole thing works fairly smoothly (if a bit obviously) as a metaphor for how we all feel about corporations trying to advertise to an audience that is tired of advertising, and is not too far off from the actual shit corporations have started doing around content marketing and faux anti-advertising advertising in the 20 years since this book has been written. It also partly works because Cayce’s cool-hunting superpower, which allows her to get paid handsomely to just people-watch and look at new logo designs–a modern power fantasy if there ever was one–is balanced out by the fact that she has An Actual Phobia of the Michelin Man. This is a bit where the writing style annoyed me a bit; due to her sensitivities Cayce only wears very plain minimalist clothes in white, black, and gray, with no logos, and even has to cut all the tags out (a thing I did a bit of in my ineffectual lifestylist days), but the close third-person narration–a stream-of-consciousness that is clearly supposed to be Cayce’s consciousness–still relentlessly refers to absolutely everything by brand name every single time. The plain black Fruit of the Loom T-shirts that Cayce buys because those are the most standard, generic black T-shirts on the market and then picks the tags out of so that she is not ever assaulted by having to see the “Fruit of the Loom” logo never, ever, not once, over the course of the entire narration, become plain black T-shirts; they remain “Fruits” on every mention. This is probably a very deep and intentional narrative choice, but as someone who also hates logos I found it just as annoying to read as I do to listen to when people actually talk like that.
Anyway, after some shenanigans with a marketing company called Blue Ant wherein she is called upon to evaluate a logo redesign and somebody breaks into the borrowed apartment she’s staying in, Blue Ant’s head honcho, an annoying rich guy named Hubertus Bigend, hired her for a secret detective assignment to find the makers of the mysterious footage that Cayce and a bunch of other weirdos on the internet are obsessed with. Cayce has mixed feelings about this because rich guys like Bigend are interested in grassroots phenomena like this usually for the express purpose of commodifying them, which obviously sucks ass on principle, even if Cayce can’t figure out what Bigend would actually do with this knowledge if he found out. With the help and sometimes sabotage of a motley assortment of secondary characters, including some collectors of historical calculators, some fellow weirdos from a forum dedicated to discussing the footage, a dot-com bust guy that Bigend assigns her to work with, and the occasional hallucination of her mysteriously-disappeared-on-9/11 former-CIA-officer father, Cayce gets into and out of various scrapes and jet-sets all around the world (London, Tokyo, Moscow, Paris) and buys increasingly expensive gray and black clothes and basically networks her way into finding out what is going on–solving this mystery uses basically zero of her cool-hunting skills but lots of her willingness to pass information back and forth and use Blue Ant’s expense account to bribe her non-Blue-Ant-affiliated miscreant contacts into doing what she wants them to do.
Overall it was a fun techno-thriller and as a reader I enjoyed jet-setting dangerously around the world with Cayce and her affinity group of rich assholes and tech nerds to solve this mystery, even if the final clue proved a bit too easy. I hope Cayce’s wealthy benefactors get her a third (!!) fancypants bomber jacket (fun fact: this jacket did not exist in black when the book was published, but now it does).