We have no future because our present is too volatile. We only have risk management. The spinning of the given moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.

-William Gibson, Pattern Recognition

Mark, I highly recommend Pattern Recognition. Sure, Neuromancer is influential and everything the Wakoski brothers hoped to create in the Matrix, but Pattern Recognition stunned me due to its exceptional descriptions of the highly volatile and disruptive environment of our 21st Century lives.

I’ve also read All Tomorrow’s Parties, The Difference Engine (co-authored with Bruce Sterling) and just finished Idoru. All Tomorrow’s Parties has some interesting examinations of autonomous zones and their relationship to culture:

‘Alternative subcultures. They were a critical aspect of industrial civilization in the two previous centuries. They were where industrial civilization went to dream. A sort of unconscious R&D, exploring alternative social strategies… But they became extinct.’
‘Extinct?’
‘We started picking them before they could ripen. A certain critical growing period was lost, as marketing evolved and the mechanisms of recommodification became quicker, more rapacious. Authentic subcultures required backwaters, and time, and there are no more backwaters. They went the way of geography in general. Autonomous zones do offer a certain insulation from the monoculture, but they seem not to lend themselves to recommodification, not in the same way.’

I found The Difference Engine to be a delightful introduction to steam punk, but hardly earth-shattering. I enjoyed Idoru, but didn’t encounter any passages that compelled me to underline them.

Ultimately, it is Gibson’s powers of trend identification and cultural forecasting that draws me to his work. He spins out the implications of alternative pathways with internal coherence and immediacy. Pattern Recognition was the work that made me realize this, and therefore if Mark is going to read one more Gibson book, then it ought to be that.

…of course, I haven’t gotten my hands on Spook Country yet, so all of this might be amended…