Pattern Recognition

THE WEBSITE OF DREADFUL NIGHTFive hours' New York jet lag and Cayce Pollard wakes in Camden Town to the dire and ever-circling wolves of disrupted circadian rhythm.It is that flat and spectral non-hour, awash in limbic tides, brainstem stirring fitfully, flashing inappropriate reptilian demands for sex, food, sedation, all of the above, and none really an option now.Not even food, as Damien's new kitchen is as devoid of edible content as its designers' display windows in Camden High Street. Very handsome, the upper cabinets faced in canary-yellow laminate, the lower with lacquered, unstained apple-ply. Very clean and almost entirely empty, save for a carton containing two dry pucks of Weetabix and some loose packets of herbal tea. Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that its interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.She wonders if this gets gradually worse with age: the nameless hour deeper, more null, its affect at once stranger and less interesting?Numb here in the semi-dark, in Damien's bedroom, beneath a silvery thing the color of oven mitts, probably never intended by its makers to actually be slept under. She'd been too tired to find a blanket. The sheets between her skin and the weight of this industrial coverlet are silky, some luxurious thread count, and they smell faintly of, she guesses, Damien. Not badly, though. Actually it's not unpleasant; any physical linkage to a fellow mammal seems a plus at this point.Damien is a friend.Their boy-girl Lego doesn't click, he would say.Damien is thirty, Cayce two years older, but there is

William Gibson s first novel, Neuromancer, won the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Memorial Award, and the Nebula Award in 1984. He is the New York Times bestselling author of Count Zero, Mona Lisa Overdrive, Burning Chrome, Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow s Parties, Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, Zero History, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and The Peripheral. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife.

A masterful performance. Chicago Tribune

Gibson nails the texture of internet culture: how it feels to be close to someone you know only as a voice in a chat room, or to fret about someone spying on your browser s list of sites visited. The New York Times

Completely contemporary...his best book. San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

[An] eerie vision of our time. The New Yorker
 
Pattern Recognition races along like an expert thriller, but it rides on a strong current of melancholy, of elegy for the broken and the vanished...Gibson knows he s building on ground zero. GQ

So good it defies all the usual superlatives. The Seattle Times
 
It turns out that William Gibson knows as much about the present as he does about the future...a masterful performance from a major novelist who seems to be just now hitting his peak. Welcome to the present, Mr. Gibson. Chicago Tribune

Gibson s first novel to take place in the present takes you on a reckless journey of espionage and lies and doesn t promise a safe return...wonderfully chilling...a dangerously hip book. USA Today
 
[Gibson], who invented the future with Neuromancer, shows he s just as skilled at seeing the present. Entertainment Weekly
 
A serious thriller set in the dystopian present...glossy [and] well-paced. Time