Pattern Recognition

William Gibson's work is the best updating of Chandleresque noir I have seen, and that's true of both his science fictional and non-science fictional offerings. (Pattern Recognition falls into the latter category.) I love the pace at which his narratives move, but also enjoy the attention Gibson pays to language, something those endeavoring to write page-turners often seem to willfully neglect. And I love that Gibson is capable of noticing things of which I had been vaguely aware and of expressing and analyzing those inchoate discomforts so well: "My God, don't they know? This stuff is a simulacra of simulacra of simulacra. A diluted tincture of Ralph Lauren, who had himself diluted the glory days of Brooks Brothers, who themselves had stepped on the product of Jermyn Street and Saville Row, flavoring their ready-to-wear with liberal lashings of polo kit and regimental stripes. But Tommy surely is the null point, the black hole. There must be a Tommy Hilfiger event horizon, beyond which it is impossible to be more derivative, more removed from the source, more devoid of soul. Or so she hopes, and doesn't know, but suspects in her heart that this in fact is what accounts for his long ubiquity."