Pattern Recognition by William Gibson has to be one of the coolest books I've read recently!
It's about a woman who inhabits a board much like this one, complete with flame wars and long, lengthy posts, where people gather who are interested in a series of clips released by an anonymous filmmaker. Nobody on Earth knows who is creating these clips, what they mean, or even what order they're supposed to be in, and that makes them all the more interesting.
The meshing of real-life people and discussion boards gets discussed quite a bit in the book. There are several people who constantly flame each other on the FFF site in the book. One could almost believe that W. Gibson was a lurker on this site. I'm sure he's lurked, and even posted, on several discussion boards. You can tell just be reading his writing that he really knows his way around them! Then again, he did have a blog for a while, so I suppose he's quite familiar with the Web in general.
Pattern Recognition has a very cool, highly original premise - someone releases a movie, but the movie is entirely subjective, because the maker doesn't say in what order the scenes are, or if there is even an order to begin with, although the same characters pop up repeatedly.
The book's central character eventually finds the creator of the clips, and the ending is quite a shocker, and it's uniquely Gibson. Anyone who's enjoyed any of Gibson's books will like this book. Although the book is written in a very immediate tense, which can be a bit harsh at times to those of us more accustomed to books like "Neuromancer", it soon becomes evident that the book couldn't possibly have been written in any other way, and that this choice of writing style is the ideal one for a book like this.
Surprisingly enough, this book marks Gibson's foray into mainstream writing, although his inherent cyber-punk coolness does tend to show through here and there. There are very few writers who can put down so much detail about the world we live in without boring their readers, and Gibson does a stand-up job of conveying the London of only two years ago to the reader. And, because he is Gibson, his London sounds like a location from Neuromancer, whilst at the same time being a very ordinary, common place that many of us have visited.
Well, that's just my take on the book. I just thought that anyone who's spent more than a few hours on the Internet will find the characters in the book immediately appealing.
Regards,
[SYN],
Guerilla Book Reviewer Class (Or is that Quick & Dirty?)