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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was promoted 01:26, 11 March 2008.

Pattern Recognition (novel)

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A novel by science fiction writer William Gibson published in 2003. I've been working on it for a couple of months. It now meets all the FA criteria. maclean 06:53, 23 February 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Echo
Resolved copyedit concerns from Maralia

Oppose as it's in need of a fair amount of copyediting:

  • "to seduce the Japanese man who knows what the watermark code." - there's a verb missing here
  • "Cayce, along with an American computer security specialist, Boone Chu, hired to assist her, travel to Tokyo" - travels
  • "Two men attempt to steal the code but they escape back to London." - who 'they' is could be clearer
  • "Meanwhile, Blue Ant hires Dorotea who reveals that she was previously employed by a Russian lawyer in Cyprus to be hostile towards Cayce in an attempt to make her refuse the job tracking the film clips and it was her assistants who have been following her and attacked her in Tokyo." - runon sentence, and 'be hostile' is strange
  • "Cayce strikes a deal with him: she buys a Curta calculator for him and he will find the email address to which the watermark code was sent." - and he finds
  • "There Hubertus, Stella and Nora’s uncle Andrei, and security employees Wiktor Marchwinska-Wyrwal and Sergei Magomedov, are waiting for her." - drop the last comma
  • "Over dinner, they reveal that they have been spying on her since she posted to a discussion forum speculating that the clips may be controlled by the Russian Mafia and let her track the clips to find any security breaches in their distribution network." - runon sentence
  • "She works as advertising consultant by using her psychological sensitivity to logos and advertising and an interest in marketing trends and fads." - it's unclear what the last phrase relates to; it reads as an item in the list of what she's sensitive to
  • "with the British military intelligence." - with British military intelligence
  • "as he squats near Poole with Gypsy group." - a Gypsy group?
  • "Cayce's search for her father and Damien's excavation of the German bomber, symbolize the historicist search for a method to interpret people’s actions in the past." - drop the comma
  • "something that may have been influenced with Gibson coming to terms with the loss of his own father." - influenced by
  • "find meaning or detect pattens." - typo patterns
  • "a designer of embassy security system," - systems
  • "Following this line of thought Gibson raises the question about how the future will view today's society." - the question of
  • "One critic points out that the marketing agency, Blue Ant, portrayed in the novel, is" - One critic points out that the marketing agency Blue Ant is
  • "Gibson's product positioning language and Cayce's analysis of consumerist trends shows" - show
  • "will impact the lives of people in the remote places who will manufacture the logos" - will impact the lives of the people in remote places who will manufacture the logos
  • "an example of post-millennial science fiction, which have stories set in the "technocultural future-present"." - 'fiction...which have stories' just doesn't work
  • "Some reviewers justify the novel as science fiction by saying that the genre has increasingly become about illustrating society's inability to imagine the future[5] and that the knowledge and use of technologies, that were once considered advanced or academic, are now commonplace within society and its vernacular." - 'justify' isn't quite the right word here, and the phrase set off by commas is awkward
  • "Gibson said that the only science fiction elements are "The Footage and Cayce's special talents"" - reduce cap on The
  • "In Fredric Jameson's review he notes that with this novel Gibson is moving away from using technology as the determinant of change like he did in his previous works, to using culture." - weak prose
  • "but with neither the character, nor the reader knowing" - drop the comma
  • "and if there is one, whether it is real or conspiracy" - and, if there is one, whether
  • "Gibson use of name-dropping brands" - Gibson's; this applies to the next two sentences which begin in the same fashion
  • "Pattern Recognition includes many" - italicize the book title here and in the following sentence
  • "In common with Gibson’s previous work, Paul Di Filippo found the following in Pattern Recognition also:" - 'also' is redundant with 'in common with'
  • In the Reception section, every newspaper and journal is in plain text, but they all should be italicized. Examples: USA Today, the Globe & Mail (which should be The Globe and Mail), The Village Voice, The New York Times Book Review, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and Library Journal.
Please don't despair at the length of my list here - these are just copyedit issues; I've no problems with the content, so these should be quick fixes, and I'll be happy to support once they're cleared up. Thanks for an interesting read. Maralia (talk) 06:41, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Wah! You scared me, I thought I was alone in here. --maclean 06:46, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed some now. Will continue in a few hours. --maclean 07:21, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Boo! Take your time; I have to go try to sleep off the flu :/ Maralia (talk) 07:31, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Ok, I went through it all. Let me know what you think. --maclean 23:56, 5 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

(outdent)Well done addressing all those fixes so quickly. Only a handful left:

  • "With an interest in marketing trends and fads, she works as an advertising consultant by using her psychological sensitivity to logos and advertising." - better but still funky. Perhaps "She uses her interest in marketing trends and fads, and her psychological sensitivity to logs and advertising, in her work as an advertising consultant."
  • "One critic points out that the marketing agency Blue Ant portrayed in the novel is" - 'portrayed in the novel' is superfluous
  • "spent nine weeks on the USA Today's Top 150 Best-Selling Books" - drop 'the'; it's just 'USA Today's'
  • "Gibson's writing has been positively received by science fiction writers Dennis Danvers, Candas Jane Dorsey and Rudy Rucker." - you have used serial commas elsewhere, so this should be 'Danvers, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Rudy Rucker.'
  • You added italics on all the publication names except Library Journal. Maralia (talk) 01:15, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Support my concerns have been addressed, in record time too :) Maralia (talk) 06:40, 6 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comment. I have copyediting concerns with this article. I've posted some notes about the first paragraph of the body to the talk page; here are some more comments.
    • The central theme examines; I think this needs to be reworded; themes examining things is an uneasy metaphor. You could say "the theme is the examination of", for example.
    • Similarities with [...] were identified. Make this active: "Critics have identified similarities" or something like that.
    • He traveled to Tokyo in 2001 preparing for this new novel means that he prepared while traveling to Tokyo; I think you need "to prepare", which implies that he prepared when actually in Tokyo.
    • Using this email address Cayce makes contact with Stella Volkova, the sister of the maker of the film clips. Cayce flies to Moscow to meet Stella in person and watch Stella’s sister, Nora, work. So is Nora the maker of the clips? If so, make it "Stella Volkova, whose sister Nora is the maker of the film clips" and then "and watch Nora work" in the second sentence.
    • where the film is rendered: what does this mean?
    • Your summary of the plot ends with the Russians surrendering some data; to someone who hasn't read the book this doesn't sound much like a climactic moment. Can you state the way in which the books ends or resolves tension? E.g. "As the books ends, the Russians surrender the data [ ... ]" or "The Russians surrender the data [ ... ] and the book ends with Cayce about to begin further research into her father's disappearance". (I made that up; I just wanted to give you an example of the sort of thing I'm looking for.)
    • Benjaminian I think requires at least some inline explanation; it's incomprehensible to almost every reader without following the link. It's also not clear if you're quoting the novel or a critic; it appears to be a critic but I think you should clarify.
    • similar to lonelygirl15 also needs a short explanatory phrase inserted. "similar to" seems to be wrong usage to me; how about "gain a cult following, in the same way that the interactive web video releases of lonelygirl15 have done in the real world". However, I am not even sure this really needs to be there -- the parallel is drawn in a Business Week article, which is not a great source for literary analysis. The parallel is drawn in a quoted email from a "friend of a friend" of the columnist. I think you could just cut this, though since it's a comparison rather than a conclusion it's not that big a deal.
I'll stop there for now and will try to come back to this once you've responded. I do think you could use a third party copyedit from someone with a literary background. Mike Christie (talk) 00:06, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Thank you for these explanations, they are very useful. I knew the reference was weak so I had the lonelygirl15 part brief (though there's a lot of supporting commentaries in blogs, forums and boards). Its because the lonelygirl15 thing happened well after the book came out there has not been a lot of retro-active analysis, just in these commentaries. But I did find a brief comparison by a Washington Post columnist, so I switched the ref and expanded. --maclean 03:38, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • And I tackled that Benjaminian description. That wasn't easy. --maclean 05:06, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Struck out my comments above; I'll have another look. Can you fix that first paragraph too? Mike Christie (talk) 21:09, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
More comments:
  • The footage, released freely to a global audience with a lack of time or place indicators, has also been contrasted to the novel written under contract for a large corporation and which uses liminal name-dropping that definitively sets it in London 2002: I've copyedited this slightly, but I'm not sure I understand it. Is the novel in this comparison Pattern Recognition? If so, I don't understand the sentence since Pattern Recognition is also set in Moscow and Tokyo; if not, I don't know what it refers to.
  • The article uses present tense to discuss critical response; I started to change some of this and then stopped, realizing that it's quite a substantial change. I can see why you do it, because the individual reviews still exist, so it's reasonable to say "Toby Litt writes that ..." and so on. However, you then have to use present tense for the introductory statements too: I just changed "Critics find" to "Critics have found" because "Critics find" implies that the critics in question are still at work on those reviews. The problem is that "Critics have found" contrasts oddly with the following "Toby Litt writes". I think it would be better to change all these statements to past tense.
That's all I have time for at the moment; I may be able to come back to this tomorrow. Mike Christie (talk) 21:45, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Tenses are not my friends. I asked previously about this and was told that For reviewers comments, the present perfect and the present simple are both acceptable: "Jones has written..." or "Jones writes...". With certain phrasing, the past simple might be appropriate: "In 2004, Jones wrote..."[2] Following your line of thought with "Critics have found", I think the Jones has written... would be most appropriate. --maclean 23:26, 8 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Changed to Weak support. I am still not entirely comfortable with the tenses, but I see no other significant problems. I'll be curious to see what Skomorokh has to say; it looks as if he is going to review this. Mike Christie (talk) 20:50, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reluctant oppose. The extensive use of be-verbs leads a lot of the interpretative statements regarding theme and such to seem overly definite. For instance, "The novel's central theme is the examination of the human desire to detect patterns or meaning and the risks of finding patterns in meaningless data," may be arguable, but for a writer as deliberately vague as Gibson I don't think it can be stated so definitely as a matter of fact. I would try to substitute the various be-verbs with "involves" or some other active terms to make the writing more lively and precise. Ameriquedialectics 18:28, 9 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
That's good for a start. I will look around the article a bit more before switching to support. Ameriquedialectics 19:19, 9 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I won't oppose, but I can't support. I don't think it's ready. I read the reference provided in the text for the statement about the central theme, and the way it's represented here seems to go over the intentions of both Gibson and the reviewer, as he says: "The central idea of the novel is plainly stated. 'Homo sapiens is about pattern recognition... Both a gift and a trap.' " [3] Gibson, through his use of the "be-verb" in that quote, suggests pattern recognition is something fundamental to humanity, rather than something desirable as an object in itself. As I remember reading the book, pr was something everyone was confronted with, Cayce most obviously, but not in a desirable sense. Pattern recognition wasn't in itself something that was sought after, it was the way people found meaning in things. Ameriquedialectics 23:21, 9 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Would this be better: The central theme throughout the novel involves the natural human propensity to search for meaning with the constant risk of apophenia. By "natural human" I mean fundamental to humanity rather than specific trait to individuals and by "propensity" I am referring to an inclination rather than a conscious desire. --maclean 03:41, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I'm still iffy about it. I think that statement is better, but I'm still not sure if that was what WG was getting at. To over-analyze that one quote, he is talking about humanity on a species-level, and says as a species pattern recognition is what humanity is about, rather than simply a propensity or a thing that people do because they want to. The recognition of patterns is central to the cognitive process, and this is what makes us both recognizably and recognizable as human, Gibson suggests. By saying this is "both a gift and a trap," he seems to me to be alluding to Faust, and I think the novel is about the exploitation of pattern recognition for capital gain, and all the hubris that implies.... Actually, he not so much as implies this as hits us over the head with it by calling the seducer figure "Hubertus Bigend." Of course, this is all original research on my part, but I would feel better about it if there were more academic citations to back up the statements about pattern recognition as a theme, rather than commercial reviews in any case. Ameriquedialectics 05:17, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Comment:

  • I've not run across http://www.radiolistings.co.uk/ used as a source before (I don't do much work in modern stuff), is it considered a reliable source for listings of radio programs?

Otherwise the sources look good. Ealdgyth | Talk 19:58, 9 March 2008 (UTC) Okies, striking as it's taken care of! Thanks! Ealdgyth | Talk 03:47, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

  • It was originally referenced to bbcworldservice.com listing but it went dead (see Epbr123's comment above) so I switched it to this. Now I see the original listing is at bbc.co.uk so I just switched it to this. --maclean 20:46, 9 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support --Laser brain (talk) 21:00, 10 March 2008 (UTC) Comments[reply]
    • The fair use rationale for Image:Pattern recognition (book cover).jpg is not properly completed.
    • The novel summary in the lead is a little jarring - Cayce has a psychological sensitivity to symbols, and he's seeking creators of film clips. Can you connect those at all?
    • Can you link "postmodern" in the lead to postmodern literature?
    • "Before writing Pattern Recognition the author, William Gibson, had published seven novels (one co-written) and numerous short stories since 1977." Missing comma after Pattern Recognition. I would drop "had" and make it "beginning in 1977".
    • "Pattern Recognition was written between 2001 and 2002 while Gibson was living in Vancouver, British Columbia, and released in February 2003." Don't use commas to separate clauses that don't stand on their own. Check over the whole article for these, please.
    • "He did not travel to London or Moscow but used interviews with friends and internet resources to inform himself." Well.. "inform himself" is clunky as it suggests of what? Suggest "to research the locations" or similar.
    • I know this isn't your fault, but it seems odd that there is a Wikipedia entry for Hubertus Bigend but not for the main character of the novel. When I saw that wikilink, I traced back looking for the one I'd missed for Cayce.
    • Why are London, Moscow, and Tokyo wikilinked in the plot summary but not earlier?
    • In the Characters section, you have Bigend listed as Cayce's "foil". That is borderline interpretive.. is there a source? There is also nothing in the plot summary that indicates that label.
    • The quote in the Pattern recognition heading shouldn't begin with a lower-case letter.
    • In the Memory of history heading, you link Curta calculator for the second time. I'm not crazy about linking things twice - if you must have it, at least fix the linking to a redirect.
--Laser brain (talk) 02:51, 10 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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