Pattern Recognition

Pattern Recognition was written by William Gibson and published in 2003.  The attack on the World Trade Center  looms over this novel, Gibson's best (!) and most subtle.  In the tremendous  Neuromancer, Gibson detailed a net surfer negotiating layer after layer of internet "Ice" security....Count Zero was more of the same...cyber-jockys jacking into the matrix for one last ride and taste of "true" freedom as tears of release streamed down their faces...Cyberpunk has evolved into....the world of Cayce Pollard..?  A sensitive allergic to the brashness of advertising?  Kind of an allergic reaction to the Frederick Pohl and C.M. Kornbluth  world of Space Merchants, like 50 tears later?  Or an allergic reaction to the ostentatious reality of today...yeah, well technology will change, but the fundamental laws of advertising are eternal....

And there are layers on layers on being owned and being used and what it means to work...and who is working for who and for what and what it means...

      "We don't know what you are doing, or why.  Parkaboy thinks you are dreaming.  Dreaming for us.  Sometimes he sounds as though he thinks you're dreaming us.  He has this whole edged-out participation mystique:  how we have to allow ourselves so far into the investigation of whatever this is, whatever you're doing, that we become part of it.  Hack into the system.  Merge with it, deep enough that it, not you, begins to talk to us.  He says it's like Coleridge, and De Quincey.  He says it's shamanic.  That we may all seem to just be sitting there, staring at the screen, but really, some of us anyway, we're adventurers.  We're out there, seeking, taking risks.  In hope, he says, of bringing back wonders.  Trouble is, lately, I've been living that."

Mr. Gibson is great at depicting the artist in the story as well:

     "And from it, and from her other wounds, there now emerged, accompanied by the patient and regular clicking of her mouse, the footage.
     In the darkened room whose windows would have offered a view of the Kremlin, had they been scraped clean of paint, Cayce had known herself to be in the presence of the splendid source, the headwaters of the digital Nile she and her friends had sought.  It is here, in the languid yet precise moves of a woman's pale hand.  In the faint click of image-capture.  In the eyes only truly present when focused on this screen.
     Only the wound, speaking wordlessly in the dark."