A quick internet search revealed to me that Pattern Recognition, the eighth novel by William Gibson, was the first to be on the New York Times Bestsellers list, and the first to be set in a contemporary world instead of a fantastical one. The increased overall popularity of the more recent William Gibson novels ( as opposed to Neuromancer, whose popularity was more of a word-of-mouth cult hit ) may be due to this; however, speaking personally, I found the contemporary world of Pattern Recognition less compelling.
The most obvious thing about Gibson's work is that it is so incredibly dense and detailed, convoluted with tech-slang and computer jargon everywhere. " Cognitive estrangement ", as mentioned in the first week; making a fictional world so strange that it forces us to re-examine the way we think about reality. Neuromancer's early-cyberspace world does this with its advanced technologies and virtual worlds. Pattern Recognition tries to do the same. Unfortunately, Pattern Recognition takes it too far, by creating a world ( ironically, even more " grounded " in our reality ) that's so alien that the message is lost in its own convolution.
This, of course, may well be the point. Gibson may be trying to show us that the future ( which we are living in now ) is even more alien and disconnected than we ever could have imagined. But the narrative didn't communicate this to me as well. Neuromancer may have been talking about a profoundly artificial world, but it did so through a more traditional narrative-- a designated ( if not actually ) heroic protagonist on an action-packed adventure, who ends up changing the world at large. The characters may have been thinner and more cliche, but they were identifiable-- familiar " cliches " to ground very unfamiliar ideas. The cast of Pattern Recognition are more complex, but also much harder to define, and thus I think the power of the statements in the book are lost.
To wit: Case is an anti-heroic super-hacker, a " console cowboy " who could be a typical video game hero. Cayce is a design-sensitive marketing consultant who explores metropolitan board meetings, club scenes, and hotel arrangements in an attempt to find context and understanding in her multimedia world. More complex, but almost paralyzingly so.
I definitely see where this is coming from...I was quite confused in several places in the novel just by the use of so much jargon and the oddness of the language.
What perplexes me is how unfamiliar the novel seems (and how difficult and complex Cayce's world is) yet how much it still parallels to today, despite the fact that I thought I had a decent idea of how the world worked (specially some of the technology we use regularly).
And now, I'm not so sure about that....things like the internet have gotten so extensive that I'm surprised I don't feel overwhelmed by it all.
I disagree. I like both novels, and I think Pattern Recognition is a more powerful novel precisely because the stuff is understated. It's not a chase to create a world-spanning AI, the main character's not an impressive hacker... the footage-search, the modern world, and all that are all the more subversive because their outlandishness sneaks under the radar. I mean, seriously - here is a world where people aren't sure that the video clips they're obsessing over, frame by frame, are CGI and not live action! Here is a world where there's a bar in London whose decor consists of massive images of Vietnam War propaganda written on soldiers' lighters. Here is a world where rich Moscow syndicates can purchase an exemption from traffic laws. And yet, these aspects of the novel are accepted as "realistic" and representative of the world in which we live.
The more absurd points - an "allergy" (I presume, a psychosomatic reaction) to certain logos and marketing; a secret NSA program that monitors all internet traffic; a bitchy, two-timing ex-industrial espionage agent who works for the Russian mafia - these might arouse some disbelief (or at least suspension of disbelief), but in doing so, they still provide a commentary, of sorts, on the modern world, in a more overt way than the easily-accepted strangities I mentioned before.
You say that the NSA is not spying on all internet traffic. I seriously doubt that. In fact, AT&T, among other companies, has been sued by the EFF because of just such activities, in which the entire routing hub at one of their locations was routed through a secret room before being sent out.
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/att/SER_klein_decl.pdf
http://w2.eff.org/legal/cases/att/#legal
This case broke, I believe in early 2006, with the release of the Klein declaration that I linked to above. It is fascinating to me to see the close parallels between Gibson's novel and the real world, from the video posting that we discussed in class to ubiquitous surveillance like I mention here.
I disagree with you, katashitakashi, that this novel lost much of its meaning because of all the jargon. I feel like the jargon helped to place it, to bring it into the real world in a way that a general description would not have. I think that it increased the relevance of the novel, in fact, though I am afraid that this increased relevance will result in the novel being less able to stand the test of time.
It's interesting as well, coming from a very technical family (my dad was a network administrator for years, and now writes code for the design of electrical systems in the Boeing 787) to see how others reacted to the jargon in this book. To me, it was quite familiar, and it didn't require much readjustment to find myself quite present in the world.
Overall, I think that the subtlety and the richness of the terminology really adds to the novel.