Pattern Recognition (Blue Ant, #1)

by William Gibson

Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition, he says. Both a gift and a trap.

“Of course,” he says, “we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which ‘now’ was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient ‘now’ to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile.”

Interesting . Gibson always makes me think.

Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the products themselves, athletic shoes or feature films.

That could be true.

Everything, today, is to some extent the reflection of something else.”

She hails a taxi, its rear door popping open for her in that mysterious Japanese way.

Pocari Sweat

She concentrates on her breakfast, eggs poached to perfection and toast sliced from a loaf of slightly alien dimensions. The two slices of bacon are crisp and very flat, as though they’ve been ironed. High-end Japanese hotels interpret Western breakfasts the way the Rickson’s makers interpret the MA-1.

“What’s it like?” “Somewhere between a three-month 1968 rock concert, mass public grave-robbing, and Apocalypse Now.

It’s just I hate the loss of control, you know?” “It was probably an illusion that you were ever in control in the first place.”

The Fanta has a nasty, synthetic edge. She wonders why she bought it. The tabloid doesn’t go down any better, seemingly composed in equal measure of shame and rage, as though some inflamed national subtext were being ritually, painfully massaged, for whatever temporary and paradoxical relief this might afford.

This is an interesting read. Two more books in the series after this one.

National icons are always neutral for her, with the exception of Nazi Germany’s, and this not so much from a sense of historical evil (though she certainly has that) as from an awareness of a scary excess of design talent. Hitler had had entirely too brilliant a graphics department, and had understood the power of branding all too well.

They only allowed two colors of paint, one dead gray and a brown that looked as much like shit as it’s possible for brown to look. A brown you can smell.”

Parkaboy would get it. But who else would? Not, she’s now certain, Boone. Bigend, probably, but in that way of his, in which he seems to somehow understand emotions without ever having partaken of them.

Now we say that everything Lenin taught us of communism was false, and everything he taught us of capitalism, true.”