A Brief Look at Two Themes of William Gibson's 'Pattern Recognition'

Internet and the prospects of online social networks:

The author seems to have a lot to say about the internet.

The Internet’s use in Pattern Recognition is more or less what it is today: an aggregation of data (implied) and a meeting ground for various internet forums. Even the protagonist’s own internet clique, Fetish:Footish:Forum is more or less a meeting grounds for like-minded people.

Continuing on the use of the internet, is the heavy use of email within the plot. Perhaps, as some social commentary, it is significant that the amount of email text is large and the spoken dialogue small. While possibly not true, and only appearing that way for the conservation of detail, it at least suggests that significant information is increasingly transmitted via email.

Amd moreover, the author clearly brings up some of the darker sides of the internet, albeit in an unusual way. The protagonist and her team of internet friends, in order to achieve a goal related to (up to at least page 184) the book’s unobtanium, I mean macguffins, create a false persona to lure a real person to meet them. The same tactic used by child predators, but in reverse (considering the false persona’s ambiguous age).

Meeting generic expectations of science fiction:

The novel simply doesn’t meet the generic expectations of scifi. If it were to be considered science fiction at all, it would be certainly expressive of a shift of the genre. The biggest problem with claiming the story to be science fiction is like claiming an older western novel (if one were to exist) featuring a train heist where the robbers cut the telegraph cables. It’s not so much science fiction, because it uses everyday, conventional objects that, even at the time it was written, were common and everyday. Science fiction in the generic sense is supposed to majorly use new, emerging, and usually, if not almost always, futuristic (be that a progressive or regressive future) technology in order to come to terms with the issues those technologies create. Perhaps if it fails at science fiction, it’s because it provides the reader with very little new things to think about. It could easily serve for historians looking back to understand the era it was written in. But in the meantime, just read The Stranger for the existentialist angst, along with the camera-like narrator, and any Sherlock Homes novel for the who-dunnit plot.

Author's Note: Pattern Recognition is a book by William Gibson, whose title should have been italicized (or underlined, at least) in the post title, but was not due to formatting issues.