Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition is a novel by the American-Canadian writer William Gibson, published in 2003. It was his first book set in the present day rather than in a future, and it keeps the thriller shape of his earlier fiction.

Cayce Pollard is thirty-two and makes her living from a condition rather than a skill: corporate symbols affect her physically, which makes her unusually good at judging whether a new logo will work. In London to consult for an advertising agency, she is caught up in the business of finding the people behind a series of film clips posted anonymously to the internet.

The clips have no title and no credited author, and the community that watches them has built a theory around every fragment. Cayce's search takes her through London, Tokyo and Moscow, through fashion, marketing and the museum trade, and towards the question of who is making the footage and why. Gibson uses the hunt to examine how people read pattern into noise, and what it costs to need the meaning to be there.