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11.12.02 Pattern Recognition, the latest book by William Gibson.
'Pattern Recognition', the latest book by William Gibson, one of the chief exponents of the cyberpunk movement, will be out on February 2003 in the USA. The press releases tell that the book will be published by Putnam and will be 370 pages long. Set for the first time in present times, the book follows the intuition of his friend Sterling, who abandoned some years ago the sceneries of the near future, setting his stories against the background of contemporary events instead. The social need of imagining a future is probably over, replaced by that of interpreting a present far too complex and interesting. The book tells the story of Cayce Pollard, a marketing consultant living in London, in the September 11th aftermath, following the traces of an Internet subculture populated by users obsessed by the release of mysterious filmed shots, and his task is discovering their source. The main character is hired by a corporation trying to push a new logo of a shoe product, and she travels the continents together with the yellow hues which cross it and her aversion to logos. Gibson's themes are still the same (globalization, constant surveillance, paranoia and pattern recognition), but now more than ever mixed with everyday elements such as Google and Echelon, and with the usual wonderful metaphores, such as the 'soul delay', as Pollard defines the time needed by the spirit to align with the body. The only possibility of reading the book, before being able to find it on the Net, is buying at a higher price the rare 'advance copies', that is, the not-yet-final drafts, which were passed to the distributors and are now being put on Ebay for auction