There are some thoughts I've been having today.

Facts:
- William Gibson has been known to predict the future, with more or less accuracy.
- Pattern Recognition is his first book set in the present day. It differs much from his previous works.

I think WG might, in some way, be trying to deduce the Present, from the Past.
It sounds kind of obvious, from where we stand, to say things like "this caused that/ that went wrong, and now we're here". But, when you look at it closely : there are many different factors, that can cause a single event.
It's up to one's subjectivity to choose an event in the Past, and decide that this one was a turning point (nodal point, anyone?), that caused the present situation.

It's quite similar to science fiction like what WG used to do : select some present trends, and decide what might result of it.
But it's less obvious.


This whole reverse-SF thing comes from some elements in the book :

- The Curta : these old computers are not really famous, and most people will simply forget them when retracing the history of computer-science. (Well, I would forget them, hadn't I read PR)

- Cayce's memories : 9/11 has stuck her in the past. This was clearly a nodal point for her (and the whole World, admittedly).

- Cayce's mother : stuck in the past too, in her own way.

- Damien : his character is the source of my present musings. I have always wondered what was the meaning of the unearthed aircraft (except the coolness of it.).
I can look at it this way : Damien's team is acting like archeologists, but the history they try to discover is recent. Discovering the present through the recent past is much harder than using long time periods.
Obviously it's easier to say "Man appeared, evolved during a very long time, and here we are, the product of evolution and human-rituals." than "The second world war caused human beings to react and this is the result of it."
The difference is that in the second case, we can only speculate, on the truthfulness of the ideas expressed.
It's speculation! Exactly like science fiction!

What do you think of this?

Woohooooooooooooooo!
Ladies and gentlemen, I'm on fire tonight!

--
ArkanGL

That man's on fire!

quote:

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Obviously it's easier to say "Man appeared, evolved during a very long time, and here we are, the product of evolution and human-rituals." than "The second world war caused human beings to react and this is the result of it."
The difference is that in the second case, we can only speculate, on the truthfulness of the ideas expressed.

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I don't really see the difference. In both cases, it's only a level
of speculation and the fineness of the data gets grainier
the farther you look back.

It's an interesting idea, but I think WG's been doing this the
entire time. One of the appealing (to me) features of WG's work
is that his vision of the future always seemed to have a sense
of history. Before the revolutionary cyberpunk writings, most
scifi took place in a future that had managed to wipe out
all or almost all possible history. At least, history that we
all know. The near future authors really couldn't do this
logically and so incorporated our history, but also our present
and took it to the logical (sometimes) conclusion.

I think PR does this, but doesn't bother to project into the
future. It also serves to realign our lenses on the unevenly
distributed future, so it seems a lot more futuristic. It takes
our mundane world and points out that we are (or could be)
living in a scifi-like world. It's all a matter of perspective.

quote:

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I don't really see the difference. In both cases, it's only a level
of speculation and the fineness of the data gets grainier
the farther you look back.

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That's what I wanted to emphasize : if you choose to study the recent past, you have too much data to process.
The 'useless' events still heven't proved their lack of impact.
If you study very old events, you've got less data, things are still speculation, but since speculation is based on the facts you know... the less facts you know, the easier and more straightforward the speculation.

Maybe I'm vexing your archeologist self ^^'

quote:

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It's an interesting idea, but I think WG's been doing this the
entire time.

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I agree.
As you said, there is a sense of history to his future.

Then what's the difference between the use of history in PR and in any other present-day book? I think it's the events WG chose. But I don't know how to generalize them.
It's just different from everything else : the Curta and the plane...

I think you are reading too much intention on Gibson's descriptions. Curta's are cool gadgets, mechanical and definite items, like Silencio's watches or Turner's S&W. Their presence is iconic, a would be collector showing his preferences.

The plane is a much more complex picture, as it both references earlier Russia (USSR) relationship with the world, and showcases the "new" Russia and how to do things there. It also justifies to have Damien in Russia, close enough to push Cayce in the good direction, but remote enough to be useless when she needs help. And a complete WWII aircraft is the ultimate mechanical object before the arrival of the digital and the electronics. Another icon you forgot is the ZX80, and its descendants, the Cube and the i-Book.

I get a sense of the past, but not of how the past brings the present. There is no explanation, no analysis either of Russia's fall into the maws of Capitalism or of 9/11, the two main historical events influencing the novel. The end of Cold War and the start of the new Warm War.

He shows us roots, and trees, but we have to decide what roots if any fit with the trees. Meanwhile, without noticing, we see a forest.

José

quote:

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Originally posted by JRE:
I think you are reading too much intention on Gibson's descriptions.

snip

I get a sense of the past, but not of how the past brings the present. There is no explanation, no analysis either of Russia's fall into the maws of Capitalism or of 9/11, the two main historical events influencing the novel. The end of Cold War and the start of the new Warm War.

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I don't know. I think the plane isn't what
demonstrates the historical perspective so much
as the excavators' reactions to it. There's an
implied history there, and even if we're not
privy to the whys of that historical process, it
adds a certain depth to WG's work.

Are we reading too much into this? WG introduces us to cool concepts - real and invented - like Mirrorshades, Curta, The Walled City, Buried WWII aircraft, VL spectacles, Gas Stations in the style of Ming the Merciless. Sometimes the concepts are projections of current trends, sometimes they are things he found out in the news, sometimes they are just ideas he thinks might sell. Then he passes on, while we are left in his sacred dust plume, fingering over the wonders to which he has introduced us.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: gil,

Of course there is a long and grand tradition of reading too much into these things, promulgated by departments of English Literature in universities around the world. So I say we shouldn't let pesky details like plausibility interfere with the fun.

The point of this thread is is reading too much.
I am just toying around with the idea that PR could be some kind of mirror-version of WG's previous books.
In order to demonstrate such an unlikely thing, I have to find clues of it. This involves reading too much in insignificant events, put in for the sake of coolness.
I usually don't take part in the tradition Colin describes, except fot his thread.

--
ArkanGL

"Reading too much into things" is a cliche aimed at getting people to think less. Gibson reads too much into things. We in turn read too much into his material. It's an endless cycle, but I think a productive one, for there are many currents at work in Gibson's work, at least as many as he seems to thing are at work in History (or some conception of historical development that avoids the "grand narrative" of progress). I really like the "iconic" nature of the artifacts his characters get obsessed with, because what makes the objects icons is elusive. The links between the Curta, the ZX80, and the Macintoshes have to do with the creation of data management hardware: the inner workings of Cayce's iBook are just as cryptic as the way the Curta is actually used (just try that simulator that's out on the web: I'm amazed anybody figured out anything on that machine). The ultimate link for me was Cayce's feeling that (when she visits the dig) she was excavating not for the airplane (or anything specifically artifactual) but for the recovering of humanity ("... if they had [asked] she might have told them she was weeping for her century, though whether the one past or the one present she doesn't know" [356]).

"I think WG might, in some way, be trying to deduce the Present, from the Past.
It sounds kind of obvious, from where we stand, to say things like "this caused that/ that went wrong, and now we're here". But, when you look at it closely : there are many different factors, that can cause a single event.
It's up to one's subjectivity to choose an event in the Past, and decide that this one was a turning point (nodal point, anyone?), that caused the present situation."

This is an interesting theory. That Gibson is reverse engineering the unconscious processes of his own sepulative musings. that the pot is to be seen boiling backwards and rather than the stew itself he now seeks the original constituent elements that made it.

Gibson himself stated at one reading, and I believe elsewhere, that this was a novel that was done as a reset of sorts, a taking stock. the world had become too sci-fi he said so that if he wanted to write actual sci-fi he needed to see where exactly we were in the present. Thus Pattern Recognition, which if taken broadly, is Cayce's own attempt to root herself in some sort of implacable now, a task echoed by the world in the strange beginnings of this century. I think, in its way, PR is also an elegy to the 20th century and all that accompanied it. the Curtas, the Stukas in the mud, a war that perhaps made more sense than those that lie ahead, and for Gibson perhaps a certain nostalgia for a time when the business of scienfe fiction was a lot less paralell to the world in which we actually exist. In this fashion then, I think PR becomes a point of demarckatrion between centuries and perhaps between the work of Gibson's that came strictly out of the last one and that work which will spring more fully from the new. PR is then a tentative bridge between the two. though at what level this is a conscious attempt is hard to say. Apophenia being a sort of trade skill of the past century, though of sci-fi authors and mystics rather than security consultants. But isn't it that sort of Jack-move, lateral thinking that remain the only hope of sorting out these messy begininngs here on the edge of the tomorrow? And whatever that might bring, I think Gibson is right when he says that we are on the cusp of something, some strange and God all monster nodal point that all the weird events of today are some odd harbinger of.

There,s some overdevolped apophenia for you.

quote:

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Originally posted by UberDog:
... I think Gibson is right when he says that we are on the cusp of something, some strange and God all monster nodal point that all the weird events of today are some odd harbinger of...

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If that doesn't make your skin crawl...

punctuated equilibrium

It's worth adding that, if you have a reasonably consistent set of ideas about the future as Gibson has (no aliens, for example, no space travel), and if the future you envisage is fairly close to us in time, and essentially a projection of some current trends, then eventually (if your sense of where we are going is accurate) the world will catch up with you. In theory, Gibson might start writing novels set in the recent past at some stage. The world of Neuromancer, for example, is clearly closer to us now than it was when the book was published. If we disregard the surface of the book (gadgets and icons, for example) then the themes of the book, to do with technology and human identity, are more relevant today than they were then. You can argue that in its essentials something like the world of Neuromancer is already here. Thus PR - which of course would have unhesitatingly been labelled SF had it been published twenty years ago.

quote:

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Originally posted by ArkanGL:
Obviously it's easier to say "Man appeared, evolved during a very long time, and here we are, the product of evolution and human-rituals." than "The second world war caused human beings to react and this is the result of it."
The difference is that in the second case, we can only speculate, on the truthfulness of the ideas expressed.
It's speculation! Exactly like science fiction!

What do you think of this?

--
ArkanGL

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Very interesting! I wish I had more time to think it out. The different reactions to stress situations and the artifacts that symbolize the reactions. The way individuals deal with the ducks that crash into them or they crash into. The Curta created in Buchenwald a reaction to confinement? The Stukka reaction to paranoia created out of desparation and aggression (I'm clueless)?? The ZX-80 reaction to cold war? Oh yeah and the footage a reaction to a terrorist attack?

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Eric,

quote:

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Originally posted by JRE:
I think you are reading too much intention on Gibson's descriptions. Curta's are cool gadgets, mechanical and definite items, like Silencio's watches or Turner's S&W. Their presence is iconic, a would be collector showing his preferences.

The plane is a much more complex picture, as it both references earlier Russia (USSR) relationship with the world, and showcases the "new" Russia and how to do things there. It also justifies to have Damien in Russia, close enough to push Cayce in the good direction, but remote enough to be useless when she needs help. And a complete WWII aircraft is the ultimate mechanical object before the arrival of the digital and the electronics. Another icon you forgot is the ZX80, and its descendants, the Cube and the i-Book.

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Just thought I'd add something to an old thread as my first post here.

I think there's a strong link between the ZX81 (not the ZX80, which wasn't in the book - I used to own one many years ago), the Curta and the WWII aircraft, and it's all to do with the fetishisation of the object (a predominant underlying theme in Gibson's work, emphasised strongly in PR because of Cayce's role in the marketing industry, which concerns itself obsessively with this fetishisation).

As an artist, this ties in very strongly with the artwork of Joseph Cornell which clearly takes ordinary objects and elevates them to icons (and while the Cornell influence is most open in Count Zero, he also gets name-checked in PR).

"we are on the cusp of something, some strange and God all monster nodal point that all the weird events of today are some odd harbinger of..."

Gibson in this instance is just one of several billion Jeremiahs atop the city walls, wailing, 'Whoa lookit DAT!"

We've entered not just a new century but a new millennium. The still most powerful nation is decidedly Xtiasn, and of an Apocalyptic bent.

Y2K approached and gave us a very real, even quantifiable End of World bogeyman. It was, in fact, so real and quantifiable that WE WERE ABLE TO FIX IT...

...what a let down, eh? World Not Ending after all.

Then for USA at least, and its reflective nemesis, militant Islam, the End was decalred alive and well and nicely imminent when two planes torched the Two Towers.

The more rational of us said something sensible like 'whathafuck?' but the righteous saw them as the Hammers of God or Satan.

Summary: millennial fever started with a wet firecracker. 911 lit the fuze and blew the lid off. Now we're rolling down not just a precipitous geoplolitical incline, amid an increasing pall of environmental meltdown and growing arsenals og WMD, but we're also sliding down a trough of mythohistory.

After all, anyone who grew up reading 50s/60s sci-fi KNOWS that this 21st century was gonna be a muthah...

I cheat here by dragging a comment from an archived topic:

"I love this man's writing so dearly when he gets a good one in - the meta self-mockery of Billy "Cyberpunk" Prion, the sly reference to the "single episode" of an X-Files-esque show. I have always, in point of fact, loved his writing, and been apologist number one for it in circles of the disapproving. But I'm wondering now why WG could not have left out the chase/mystery aspect and just written the laughing chronicle of mediated xistenz he's been allusively promising at least since Count Zero. Sigh."

Poor Gib. Some folks think the book lacked sufficient violence/fear/paranoia/villains; others wish he'd avoided any nemeses other than Cayce's allergy and her fear of exposing the 'footagist' to commercial exploitation.

Give the guy a break. He's not ready to write the Really Good Book that critics and fringe fans adore but booksellers despise because it flops. Gotta get some dentures and maybe a prostate surgery before going there.

Also, books are, um, commodified. Most commodities lose their allure before their actual functionality expires. So the last ten pages neither kept you on the edge of your seat nor provided a summary gravitas, a final poetic mystery to ponder. What do you expect of a manufactured item?

Shucks, I was real happy to see that nice Cayce lady snuggle up her nose between the shoulder blades of that Middle-Aged White Guy and finally get a good night's sleep. Too many neatly tied loose ends? Heroine gets rich, gives money to deserving second-tier plot characters? Congratulations: you've just recognized a pattern!

By the by, I saw the Cayce/Case similarity as a formal farewell to Sprawl/Bridgeland. As for 'insufficient villains', I find it funny that Dorotea is deemed 'just TOO bitchy' in a book by an author who's made near-genocidal corporations-as-organized-crime his standard literary backdrop. But still there was body count galore: the Russian military dig, the WTC collapse (at least as big a count there as Neuromancer's hysterical death scene in the crowded public building), the thousands of Russians dying in prison from disease, the footage sisters' dead parents... for once in a Gibson novel the corpses were refreshingly decayed, to coin a malapropism, not left in a detective trail of still-bleeding plot devices. As for Dorotea, she was sucked up by a Russian whirlwind, as befits a wicked witch. Probably got dumped in Kansas.

Indeed, I felt kindly teased by the end. All that suspense of waiting for the bad'uns to show and all we get is a pompous thug getting his nose crushed by a girl in better trim than him.

Evil and mayhem were there, but viewed from a perspective more familiar to us: the bodies tidily disposed, the lethal machinations of power mostly hidden, the blindness of tragedy not limited to starving orphans in ghettoes but also shown to touch the lives of the very rich children of the very powerful, as one sister spends her days in a sleepwalking daydream creating meaning a pixel at a time...

...and that single great line: "It was like watching one of her dreams on television." (paraphrase caveat)

Very insightful observations Blue Raj. I hate to follow them with the mundane, but I wanted to comment on the thought that started this thread:

"I think WG might, in some way, be trying to deduce the Present, from the Past." ArkanGL

Faulkner does this the best, but the present he commented on has pretty much drifted into the past for us. Gibson is doing what Faulkner did, to some degree. Except the topics he chooses, the rhythm of his writing, the syntax even, all speak of acceleration. It's not just that his world is moving faster than Faulkner's but that it's accelerating. He's not just commenting about the way of the world (today and tomorrow) but about the acceleration itself.

PR might be Gibson's early Yoknapatawpha for the later works. I wouldn't discount another work set in an earlier time, but I don't think a far future work is out of the question.

The one set of comments from "No Maps For These Territories" that stuck with me the most was the stuff about nanotechnology and how it would do away with economics and how Gibson couldn't quite get his head around it yet. He made the attempt with ATP, but I don't think he's done with that set of ideas yet. And it seems the nano stuff would most likely fit a far future setting than a near future one.

quote:

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Originally posted by the blue raj:
"we are on the cusp of something, some strange and God all monster nodal point that all the weird events of today are some odd harbinger of..."

Gibson in this instance is just one of several billion Jeremiahs atop the city walls, wailing, 'Whoa lookit DAT!"

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That is disgustingly hilarious and accurate. Great imagery sir.

I agree with Saturnine. Further:
Quote from the Blue Raj:
"Then for USA at least, and its reflective nemesis, militant Islam, the End was decalred alive and well and nicely imminent when two planes torched the Two Towers.
The more rational of us said something sensible like 'whathafuck?' but the righteous saw them as the Hammers of God or Satan"

I seem to remember that the actual sensible quote of the day, by a passerby on one of the broadcast videos, was actually "Holy shit!" - which was both spontaneous and a philosophically accurate description of the events.