It’s a sign of the times that the new novel by sci-fi veteran William Gibson is his first set entirely in the present day. Twenty years ago, Gibson’s Neuromancer – his vision of a globalized world of high-tech hustlers, media spindustrialists, and all-powerful multinational corporations – was still sellable as science fiction. Today, with history having largely caught up to the novel’s vision, it seems fitting that Gibson is focussing on the present.

Cayce Pollard, Pattern Recognition’s heroine, is a New York-based “cool hunter” who sniffs out nascent street-level subcultures for corporate clients looking for the next big thing to exploit. She’s also involved in one such subculture herself: the cult of “the footage,” a mysterious series of gorgeous movie clips – created by an unknown artist known simply as the Maker – that are being quietly disseminated on the Internet. As the footage gains notoriety, threatening to become a genuine trend, Cayce’s corporate clients smell blood. When one of them asks her to sniff out the source of the footage, her desire to meet the Maker overwhelms her trepidataion at turning the footage into just another commodity.

It’s a clever setup, but the ensuing story of Cayce’s globe-and-Internet-trotting search for the Maker occasionally degenerates into genre-fiction clunkiness. Not that it matters much – Gibson’s plots are mainly pretexts for his densely textured riffs on globalization, pop culture, and high technology. In Pattern Recognition, these riffs don’t make for any grand insights, aside from some half-convincing reflections on the impact of Sept. 11 on global consciousness. But less ambitious observations on subjects like the mythic dimension of the Internet or Western culture’s obsession with fashion are spot on.

Pattern Recognition may not show us the future of our volatile world, but it does an excellent job of capturing the texture of our chaotic present.