Reception
Pattern Recognition was released on February 3, 2003 as Gibson launched a 15-city tour. The novel was featured on the January 19 cover of The New York Times Book Review. In the American market it peaked at number four on the New York Times Best Seller list for hardcover fiction on February 23 and spent nine weeks on USA Today's Top 150 Best-Selling Books peaking at number 34. In the Canadian market, the novel peaked at number three on The Globe and Mail's best seller list on February 15 in the hardcover fiction category. The novel was shortlisted for the 2004 Arthur C. Clarke Award and the British Science Fiction Association Award.
Gibson's writing was positively received by science fiction writers Dennis Danvers, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Rudy Rucker. Rucker has written: "ith a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics" and Danvers wrote that "no sentence has a subject if it can do without one". One critic found the prose to be as "hard and compact as glacier ice" and another that it "gives us sharply observed small moments inscribed with crystalline clarity". Gibson's descriptions of interiors and of the built environments of Tokyo, Russia and London were singled out as impressive, and The Village Voice's review remarked that "Gibson expertly replicates the biosphere of a discussion board: the coffee-shop intimacy, the fishbowl paranoia, the splintering factions, the inevitable flame war". Lisa Zeidner of The New York Times Book Review elaborated:
As usual, Gibson's prose is ... corpuscular, crenelated. His sentences slide from silk to steel, and take tonal joy rides from the ironic to the earnest. But he never gets lost in the language, as he sometimes has in the past. Structurally, this may be his most confident novel. The secondary characters and their subplots are more fully developed, right down to their personal e-mail styles. Without any metafictional grandstanding, Gibson nails the texture of Internet culture: how it feels to be close to someone you know only as a voice in a chat room, or to fret about someone spying on your browser's list of sites visited.
Filled with name-dropping of businesses and products, such as MUJI, Hotmail, iBook, Netscape, and G4, the language of the novel was judged by one critic to be "awkward in its effort to appear "cool" " while other critics have found it overdone and feared it would quickly date the novel. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette review commented that the "constant, unadulterated "hipster-technocrat, cyber-MTV" lingo overdone and inappropriate" On the technology, Cory Doctorow found Gibson's use of watermarks and keystroke logging to be hollow and has noted that "Gibson is no technologist, he's an accomplished and insightful social critic ... and he treats these items from the real world as metaphor. But ... Gibson's metaphorical treatment of these technologies will date this very fine book".
Some critics found the plot to be a conventional "unravel-the-secret" and "woman on a quest" thriller. Toby Litt wrote that "udged just as a thriller, Pattern Recognition takes too long to kickstart, gives its big secrets away before it should and never puts the heroine in believable peril". The conclusion, called "unnecessarily pat" by one critic, was compared by Litt with the "ultimate fantasy ending of 1980s movies – the heroine has lucked out without selling out, has kept her integrity but still ended up filthy rich." The review in the Library Journal called the novel a "melodrama of beset geekdom" that "may well reveal the emptiness at the core of Gibson's other fiction", but recommended it for all libraries due to the author's popularity.
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