58 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER16, 2019
plane hit. It wasn’t an accident.’” The
attack rewrote our expectations. It made
life instantly scarier. It also seemed to
adjust the temporality of the world. From
then on, events would move faster. There
would be no screen—only a locomotive.
“Pattern Recognition” and its sequels,
“Spook Country” (2007) and “Zero His-
tory” (2010), are “set in a world that meets
virtually every criteria of being science
fiction, and that happens to be our
world,” Gibson has said. “We have no
future,” one character concludes. “Not
in the sense that our grandparents had
a future, or thought they did.” Such
“fully imagined cultural futures” were
possible only when “‘now’ was of some
greater duration”:
For us, of course, things can change so
abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that fu-
tures like our grandparents’ have insufficient
“now” to stand on. We have no futures because
our present is too volatile.... We have only
risk management. The spinning of the given
moment’s scenarios. Pattern recognition.
In a hyperconnected world, patterns
can repeat in different idioms. The same
ripples flow across Asia and Europe, art
and technology, war and television. Even
terror-hunting and cool-hunting are re-
lated. In “Zero History,” fashion strat-
egists tracking a reclusive designer of
otaku denim stumble into a parallel
world of clandestine arms
deals. Secrets are “the very
root of cool,” one charac-
ter explains, and so today’s
coolness flows from our
modern secrets: rendition,
black ops, Gitmo, Prism. There’s a rea-
son musicians dress like soldiers. Art
has become tactical. Culture and coun-
terterror are mirror worlds.
“Bill worried about ‘Pattern Recog-
nition,’” Womack told me. Gibson didn’t
know how people would react to his
sci-fi of the present. The novel’s protag-
onist, Cayce Pollard, isn’t a hacker but
a brand strategist who’s been hired by
a viral-marketing think tank for a com-
mercial research project. She doesn’t
zoom through glowing datascapes; in-
stead, having suffered from “too much
exposure to the reactor cores of fash-
ion,” she practices a kind of semiotic
hygiene, dressing only in “CPUs,” or
“Cayce Pollard Units”—clothes, “either
black, white, or gray,” that “could have
been worn, to a general lack of com-
ment, during any year between 1945 and
2000.” She treasures in particular a black
MA-1 bomber jacket made by Buzz
Rickson’s, a Japanese company that me-
ticulously reproduces American mili-
tary clothing of the mid-twentieth cen-
tury. (All other bomber jackets—they
are ubiquitous on city streets around the
world—are remixes of the original.) The
MA-1 is to “Pattern Recognition” what
the cyberspace deck is to “Neuromancer”:
it helps Cayce tunnel through the world,
remaining a “design-free zone, a one-
woman school of anti whose very aus-
terity periodically threatens to spawn
its own cult.” Precisely because it’s a
near-historical artifact—“fucking real,
not fashion”—the jacket’s code can’t be
rewritten. It’s the source code.
Gibson needn’t have worried about
the novel; it spawned its own cult. Buzz
Rickson’s is a real company, based in
Tokyo. (It takes its name from a charac-
ter played by Steve McQueen, who, in
Japan, is a men’s fashion icon of special
stature.) The company’s policy of mili-
tary-historical accuracy prohibits it from
making inauthentic garments; actual
MA-1 flight jackets, produced for about
twenty years, starting in the late nine-
teen-fifties, were sage green. And yet,
after “Pattern Recognition” was pub-
lished, customers began e-mailing Rick-
son’s in the hope of buying
a black version. Making an
exception, the company
collaborated with Gibson
on a black MA-1 that be-
came, in some circles, in-
stantly iconic. Made of a carefully re-cre-
ated mid-century nylon, it is simultane-
ously antique and futuristic. There is now
a range of “Buzz Rickson’s x William
Gibson” military outerwear. Meanwhile,
a decade after “Pattern Recognition,”
K-HOLE, a marketing think tank mod-
elled on the one in the novel, popular-
ized Cayce’s fashion philosophy in the
form of “normcore,” a trend—forecasted,
then real—based on the idea of secre-
tive, informed, intentional blankness.
Normcore influenced design more
broadly, shaping the aesthetics of com-
panies like Everlane and Uniqlo. The
boundary between fiction and reality
turned out to be even blurrier than Gib-
son had thought. He had rewritten the
code himself.
In earlier decades, Gibson had beenlauded for imagining futuristic devel-
opments that seemed strangely plausi-
ble: a “fractal knife” with more edge than
meets the eye; a “micro-bachelor” apart-
ment built into a retrofitted parking ga-
rage in Santa Monica. Now the polar-
ity has reversed itself. Today, on Twitter,
Gibson’s followers share bits of the pres-
ent that seem plausibly science-fictional.
Protesters in Chile use laser pointers to
bring down police drones. A stalker
tracks a Japanese pop star to her apart-
ment by extracting its reflected image
from a photograph of her pupil. (Ev-
eryday life can be Gibsonian, too: a
woman entering the subway in a tweed
blazer and camo parachute pants; kids
learning dances from Fortnite.) In
“Agency,” a customer in an otaku coffee
shop watches the silent news on some-
one else’s laptop. “If it wasn’t the hurri-
cane hitting Houston,” she thinks, “the
earthquake in Mexico, the other hurri-
cane wrecking Puerto Rico, or the worst
wildfires in California history, it was
Qamishli.” The novel has yet to be pub-
lished, but readers with advance copies
have pointed out that the fighting in
Qamishli, a city on the border between
Turkey and Syria, is now real.
Inspired by Cayce Pollard, Emily
Segal, one of the founders of K-HOLE,
runs her own “alternative” branding and
trend-forecasting consultancy, Neme-
sis, in Berlin. It’s easy, she said, to fall
into the trap of thinking that novel
things must be entirely new. Gibson, by
contrast, is often “looking for something
else—for things that aren’t especially new,
but suddenly stand out as special.” A
changing world might reveal itself not in
the never-before-seen, but in the re-seen.
“Once you get put in a position where
people and corporations think you can
predict the future, you see how much
of a bullshit enterprise that is,” she went
on. “But intuition is real, and texts and
art works take on lives of their own, and
sometimes it feels like technology does,
too. It can seem like you’re seeing the
future. Really, you’re just participating
in history.”
In Vancouver, I met a friend for din-
ner. We found each other in Gastown,
the city’s stylish old quarter, and walked
east, in search of a restaurant she wanted
to try. The walk seemed to go on and
on. I scrutinized the street numbers and
consulted my phone, where my blue dot