Rucker reviews Gibson

Cory Doctorow 6:01 am Fri Feb 7, 2003

Wired News has posted Rudy Rucker's excellent review of William Gibson's new novel, "Pattern Recognition," originally published in last month's Wired.

Cool hunting, advertising, and marketing pervade Pattern Recognition – the book's acronym is PR, after all. Pollard "knows too much about the processes responsible for the way product is positioned in the world, and sometimes finds herself doubting that there is much else going on." But The Footage is there to prove her wrong. The Web makes it possible for an independent artist to gain a global following for no commercial purpose whatsoever. Gibson exploits the inherent tension between the monoculture and the emergence of novelty. On one hand, the monoculture lives by assimilating originality. On the other, new art has nothing but the monoculture to launch itself from. It's one of the happy paradoxes of modern life.

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