Pattern recognition: "None of What We Do Here Is Ever Really Private".

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Title: Pattern recognition: "None of What We Do Here Is Ever Really Private".
Creator: Palmer, Christopher.
Subject: 420203 North American
Subject: 200506 North American Literature
Subject: 2005 (four-digit-FOR)
Date: 2006.
Publisher: DePauw University, Indiana, USA: SF-TH Inc,
Description: In this article William Gibson's Pattern Recognition is read as a response to issues raised by 9/11 that concern the power and obscenity of images. The main character has lost her father in mysterious circumstances at the fall of the towers, but the novel approaches the event obliquely, and it does not name Al Qaeda or terrorism at all, although it has a lot to tell us of the aftermath of the Cold War and of post-Soviet Russia. This article assesses these omissions and interprets what is offered in their place: Cayce Pollard's quest for the mysterious internet footage; the connections with old technologies and old disasters that her quest traces; the novel's thoughts about art, and the ambiguities of these thoughts. Much of this can be read as a response to the challenge issued by 9/11: a rethinking of when we should disclose and when withhold (or tantalize), and an ambiguous reassessment of the relations of the producers and receivers of a work of art, the footage, which is here read as ambiguously romantic and postmodern.