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Pattern Recognition by William Gibson, Viking/Penguin, 拢16.99, ISBN 0670875597 Reviewed by Dave Langford

WILLIAM GIBSON rose to fame with his luminous, compulsive images of data flow and streetwise mayhem in future cyberspace. Pattern Recognition, set barely ahead of the present, explores the subtler data manipulations of big advertising: stealth marketing, viral campaigns, the quest for the perfect logo.

His heroine is Cayce Pollard, whose tormented sensitivity to logos and brand names verges on phobia. She even dresses anonymously, every designer icon stripped from her clothes. But Cayce is also an expert 鈥渃oolhunter鈥�, a high-powered freelance with an intuitive feel for corporate imagery that doesn鈥檛 work.

When she鈥檚 consulted by top ad agency Blue Ant and vetoes a new design, mysterious harassment follows. Cayce knows who ruined her favourite jacket; but what about the trail of porn-site access on her web browser and the disturbing number on the phone鈥檚 auto-redial?

This tangle of business connections and obscure persecution intrudes on her hobby, the cult of the anonymous 鈥淔ootage鈥�. Exquisitely produced video sequences are being released at intervals on the net, a focus for fascinated web discussion of its mysterious 鈥済arage Kubrick鈥� creator. Now Blue Ant鈥檚 top man wants the unwilling Cayce to learn whether the Footage is a brilliant ad campaign for some as yet unrevealed product. Stealth marketing, indeed.

Worldwide action follows, punctuated by violence. A group of Tokyo net-geeks finds a hidden digital signature in Footage frames, a secret whose price is a most unusual seduction. The key to the cooperation of an ex-US Intelligence mathematician is his passion for antique Curta mechanical calculators (鈥渕ath grenades鈥� is the witty description of their appearance). The trail leads to something protected by fabulously wealthy Mafiosi in Moscow, and the riddle of why the one clear pattern extracted from Footage signatures resembles a Claymore mine component鈥�

Gibson expertly evokes the shiny, brittle surfaces of life at the cutting edge, the nostalgic poetry of junked technology, and the buzzing connectedness of a world that鈥檚 very small for those who don鈥檛 just use but inhabit the net. He slyly reminds us that we already live in a science-fictional future, where Tokyo is more fantastic than SF megacities, and Russian industrial pollution echoes the unattainable red dust of Mars. Cayce is a true denizen of the 21st century; her story glows with SF verve and glitter as future shock overtakes the present.