Pattern Recognition (novel) - Genre

Genre

e have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitants of our future might be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did. Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which 'now' was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. ... We have only risk management. The spinning of the given moment's scenarios. Pattern recognition. Hubertus Bigend, Pattern Recognition, pages 58–59.

While some reviewers regard the novel as a thriller, others see it as an example of post-millennial science fiction with stories set in the "technocultural future-present". Some reviewers note that the novel furthers the post-millennial trend in science fiction of illustrating society's inability to imagine a definitive future and the use of technologies once considered advanced or academic now commonplace within society and its vernacular. Gibson said that the only science fiction elements are "he Footage and Cayce's special talents" but that he "never bought that conceit that science fiction is about the future". Dennis Danvers explained the use of science fiction as a narrative strategy:

cience fiction, in effect, has become a narrative strategy, a way of approaching story, in which not only characters must be invented, but the world and its ways as well, without resorting to magic or the supernatural, where the fantasy folks work. A realist wrestling with the woes of the middle class can leave the world out of it by and large except for an occasional swipe at the shallowness of suburbia. A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building. In other words, in a science fiction novel, the world itself is a distinctive and crucial character in the plot, without whom the story could not take place, whether it's the world of Dune or Neuromancer or 1984. The world is the story as much as the story is in the world. Part of Gibson's point ... is that we live in a time of such accelerated change and layered realities, that we're all in that boat, like it or not. A novel set in the "real world" now has to answer the question, "Which one?"

These elements, and the use of the September 11, 2001 attacks as a breaking point from the past, led academics to label it a postmodern novel. The attacks mark the point where the 'modern', that is the 20th-century certainty in society's advancement towards a better future, changed to the 'postmodern', that is the 21st-century uncertainty in which future will develop. Fredric Jameson finds Gibson using culture as the determinant of change for the first time with this novel, rather than technology. Jameson focuses on the novel's "postmodern nominalism" that uses brand names to refresh old objects and experiences.

In post-structural literary theory Cayce is compared with the main character, Oedipa Maas, of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as detectives interpreting clues but with neither the character nor the reader knowing if there actually is a pattern to be found and, if there is one, whether it is real or conspiracy. Gibson's use of name-dropping brands to create a sense of "in-group style … of those in the know" is traced back to Thomas Pynchon's 1963 novel V. . Gibson's writing style is said to be similar to Raymond Chandler's detective stories and Alfred Hitchcock’s thrillers that used MacGuffins (the identity of the maker of the footage, in this case) to drive the story. Gibson's social observations are influenced by the works of Naomi Klein and Malcolm Gladwell.

While markedly different from his previous writing, in that it is not set in an imaginary future with imaginary technologies, Pattern Recognition includes many of his previous elements, including impacts of technology shifts on society, Japanese computer experts and Russian mafia figures. In common with Gibson’s previous work, Paul Di Filippo found the following in Pattern Recognition: "the close observation of the culture's bleeding edge; an analysis of the ways technology molds our every moment; the contrasting of boardroom with street; the impossibility and dire necessity of making art in the face of instant co-optation; the damaged loner facing the powers-that-be, for both principle and profit".