(no subject)

[prog]

Finished Pattern Recognition. I really liked it, all the way through. I hold firm to my theory that Gibson is so much more readable when writing about real technology than when trying to write about its extrapolated future. In this book, both author and protagonist are confident endusers but not techies, and I never lost the sense that the former knew what he was writing about. The characters do no hacking other than social engineering, leveraging the realistically ubiquitous communication technology in a completely believable way. (He does take a couple of magic-word liberties to let some of the hairier plot points squeeze through, but I found it easy to forgive him, particularly since he lets minor characters do it.)

Liked the characterization, too. The hero is lovable, a sort of caricature of pop-culture befrazzlement incarnated in a way that reminds me of many of my friends, and infused with just a breath of whimsical fantasy over a dollop of personal tragedy. That's a terrible description, but I really liked her.

It's also evident that Gibson wrote quickly; 9/11 factors significantly into the story, and the thanks-everyone afterword is dated August 2002. I found it interesting that the chapter in which the main character recalls that day's events is titled "Singularity", a word that doesn't appear in the text itself. I don't think that he was identifying 9/11 as Vinge's Technological Singularity, even though that was certainly what he was referring to. But he's right, I think, to use the word. I hadn't thought of it that way before, but it's true: my attitude towards things produced before 2002 often takes a dismissive tone, despite myself, because here is something made for a different world than mine.