One theme I've found, in Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition, is the idea of outsiders coming in but only on their own terms, which do not match those of the people who misuse technology (see the grey sky like a television tuned to a dead channel, and the horses they have to reconstruct from DNA).

Cayce is clearly an outsider. Not comfortable in the world of logos, sees things others do not, obviously not fit for a corporate world with its parasitic petty fights (and cigarette burns in jackets). In the end, she loses something to gain something, and has a surprisingly conventional direction... much like HDC took in Neuromancer, with Michael (reference to Angel?).

I see a lot of Burroughs in PR, without some of the hopelessness, and a lot of Tom Pynchon, although without the easy answers that wrecked Pynchon's fiction. Cayce is in many ways the inheritor of Oedipa Maas: the attractive, confident, on top of the world person, if she'd let herself be, but she's not satisfied with what society offers and this makes her an outsider.

Anyone else notice patterns like this? I think we're supposed to look for them