This time, in Pattern Recognition (Putnam $39), near-futurist guru William Gibson uses the present as his playing field.
Cayce Pollard, a jaded American design consultant, is in London to redesign a famous corporate logo. She's offered a very different assignment: find the creator of haunting video clips being uploaded to the Internet.
Marketing, globalisation and terror converge when his heroine's London apartment is burgled, her email is hacked and the records of her Manhattan therapist are stolen.
As ever, Gibson's prose is distinctively his own. Pollard is someone who removes trademarks from her clothes. She even has the buttons of her jeans ground flat by an understandably puzzled Korean locksmith.
"She checks her watch,"; writes Gibson, "its plastic case sanded free of logos with a scrap of Japanese micro-abrasive.
"She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000.";
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[SUMMER 2003 BCBW]