Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson

Alban Brooke
Jul 22, 2017 · 2 min read

“How do you think we look, … to the future?

“The future is there … looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become. And from where they are, the past behind us will look nothing at all like the past we imagine behind us now.”

Written and set in 2003, Pattern Recognition is one of William Gibson’s most accessible, beautiful, and funny novels.

Pattern Recognition follows Cayce Pollard, a design consultant, as she attempts to track down the creator of viral footage that keeps mysteriously appearing on the web. On the surface, it’s a fun story about fashion, design, and the communities that sprang up in the early day of the web, but it’s also about the uncertainty of our place in a world shook by 9/11.

The flip-phones, Curta calculators, and a Mac G4 Cube date Pattern Recognition as something from another time, but it seem to have grown better with age as it begins to feel more prophetic than speculative. It’s one of my favorite books, and I look forward to rereading it every few years.


If you’d like to read more of these mini book reviews feel free to follow me on Medium. If you enjoy audiobooks, there is a brilliant audiobook version of Pattern Recognition narrated by Shelly Frasier.

Alban Brooke

Written by

Legal and marketing for Higher Pixels. New husband and newer dad.

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