Well it’s been a while since I last posted a response, so here are some thoughts about Pattern Recognition. Two aspects of this which I thought were quite interesting were the ideas of mirror worlds and soul-delay. What struck me as particularly interesting about mirror worlds was that, in a way, I read the book as thought it was set in a mirror world to our own. It is a world we more or less know, but the manner in which Gibson presents it is quite foreign. There are Starbucks on street corners, familiar cities and recognizable brand names are everywhere. It’s a version of our world, only tweaked slightly. There are other corporations as well and the use of technology, while it seems quite commonplace in 2008, was something not unheard of, but pretty new back in 2002. I found that the notion of “cognitive estrangement” worked well in this regard since its just similar enough to home that the differences can be off-putting.

The concept of soul delay I also thought was intriguing. Cayce explains that “Damien's theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can't move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage” (1-2). She seems to be very concerned with soul-delay. I thought it was interesting so I made little ticks when it was mentioned and ended up making about two dozen ticks. In fact, she seems to be concerned with souls in general. When discussing how people of the future will look on people of her time she says that they won’t think about “ordinary actual living souls” (58) And that her father’s colleagues were not “felled by anything more sinister than stress and overwork, and perhaps by a species of depression engendered by too long and too closely observing the human soul” (227) Interestingly, despite constantly discussing souls and soul-delay she claims that she doesn’t know if she really believes in human souls. Perhaps it’s the same way she doesn’t actually believe in the EVP messages her mother is constantly sending her but which do “creep (her) out” (275) There seems to be a definitiveness about death, especially of the death of her father, which she doesn’t want to accept and souls (and EVP) are a way to extend the life of someone, so to speak, although they aren’t always believed to actually exist in a technologically and scientifically based world.