"'It's a knowledge guild,' he said soberly. 'The bosses, the big'uns, they can take all manner of things away from us. With their bloody laws and factories and courts and banks. ... They can make the world to their pleasure, they can take away your home and kin and even the work you do. ..." Mick shrugged angrily, his lean shoulders denting the heavy of fabric of the greatcoat. 'And even a rob a hero's daughter of her virtue, if I'm not too bold in speaking of it.' He pressed her hand against his sleeve, a hard, trapping grip. 'But they can't ever take what you know, now can they Sybil? They can't ever take that."

- William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine

Over the past couple of weeks, I filled one of the big gaps in my science fictional CV — I finally read William Gibson's Pattern Recognition.

It was a strange experience. During the book's first half, I was completely in love with every sentence, to the point where I would try describing it to friends, starting in pretension and eventually sliding into incoherence. (I think I managed to avoid using phrases like "the human condition," but only barely.) It was thrilling to watch Gibson deploy the same skills he used to convince readers of Neuromancer's future, but this time to tour London and the Internet, circa 2002, through the eyes of a character who sees the patterns of popular culture more intensely and vividly than we do.

But as the story approached its end, it seemed to deflate, to move (to borrow John Clute's criticism of the sequel Spook Country) into a "time out" from "the felt chaos of the world." When I closed the book, I thought, "Well, that was ... fine." I would absolutely recommend it, because it's an ambitious, partially successful work from a formidably talented writer, but, unlike Neuromancer, I don't think it will stick with me.

There are a couple of problems here. For one, Gibson spends too much time running through the plot, which is perfectly fine as plots go, but one that's considerably less interesting than his exploration of setting and character. And as is almost always the case, the answering of questions (Who created the mysterious footage that haunts the first half of the book, and why?) feels like a let down compared to the mystery itself, no matter how clever those answers are.

I wonder if my real complaint is with the model that Gibson has chosen. Neuromancer, famously, was based on film noir and hard-boiled detective fiction, specifically The Big Sleep. Judging from Gibson's recent comments on Neuromancer, he may have started chafing against some of the clichés and limitations of the noir mode, but that doesn't mean Pattern Recognition breaks free from all generic models. In its globetrotting, its blank-check expense-account that finances said globetrotting, and in its final determination to tie up all plot threads, the book behaves like a techno-thriller, albeit one that's more realistic than anything by Tom Clancy or Michael Crichton.

Cliched though they may be, I can't help but prefer the rain-soaked, neon-bathed endings of Neuromancer and stories like "Burning Chrome" to the clear-as-day, let-me-explain resolution of Pattern Recognition. In their melancholy way, they give a sense of a world that remains open, rather than a book that has shut.

GIBSON: Today I could write a version of Neuromancer where you'd see the quotidian naturalistic side, but it wouldn't be science fiction. With the fairly limited tool kit I had in 1981, I wouldn't have been able to do that, and, of course, I didn't know what it would be like.

INTERVIEWER: What was needed that you were missing?

GIBSON: I didn't have the emotional range. i could only create characters who have really, really super highs and super lows -- no middle. It's taken me eight books to get to a point where the characters can have recognizably complex or ambiguous relationships with other characters. In Neuromancer, the whole range of social possibility when they meet is, Shall we have sex, or shall I kill you? Or you know, Let's go rob a Chinese corporation -- cool!

- from the interview with William Gibson in the latest issue of the Paris Review. The magazine includes an interview with Samuel Delany that's quite good too.