Set in August and September 2002, the story follows Cayce Pollard, a 32-year-old marketing consultant who has a psychological sensitivity to corporate symbols.

The action takes place in London, Tokyo, and Moscow as Cayce judges the effectiveness of a proposed corporate symbol and is hired to seek the creators of film clips anonymously posted to the internet.

Before writing Pattern Recognition, the author, William Gibson, published seven novels (one co-written) and numerous short stories beginning in 1977.

Pattern Recognition was originally intended to be a stand-alone novel,[2] but afterwards Gibson wrote Spook Country and Zero History which take place in the same universe and use some of the same characters.

He stopped writing after watching the September 11, 2001 attacks on television and "realized [the novel] had become a story that took place in an alternate time track, in which Sept. 11 hadn't happened".

[1] He considered abandoning the novel but a few weeks later re-wrote portions to use the attacks as a motivating factor for the distress the main character feels.

After dinner with some Blue Ant employees, the company founder Hubertus Bigend offers Cayce a new contract: to uncover who is responsible for distributing a series of anonymous, artistic film clips via the internet.

Cayce is not entirely comfortable with Ivy's chat group called "Fetish:Footage:Forum" (or F:F:F), as shown by the following excerpt: There are perhaps twenty regular posters on F:F:F, and some much larger and uncounted number of lurkers.

They concoct a fake persona, a young woman named Keiko, to seduce the Japanese man who knows the watermark code.

Cayce, along with an American computer security specialist, Boone Chu, hired to assist her, travels to Tokyo to meet the man and retrieve the watermark code.

Through a completely random encounter Cayce meets Voytek Biroshak and Ngemi, the former an artist using old ZX81 microcomputers as a sculpture medium, the latter a collector of rare technology (he mentions purchasing Stephen King's word processor, for example).

The Russians surrender all the information they had collected on her father's disappearance and the book ends with Cayce coming to terms with his absence while in Paris with Parkaboy, whose real name is Peter Gilbert.

Gibson created the term mirror-world to acknowledge a locational-specific distinction in a manufactured object that emerged from a parallel development process, for example opposite-side driving or varied electrical outlets.

The term coolhunter, not coined by Gibson but used in the marketing industry for several years, is used to describe Cayce's profession of identifying the roots of emerging trends.

[16] The footage, released freely to a global audience with a lack of time or place indicators, has also been contrasted to Pattern Recognition written under contract for a large corporation and which uses liminal name-dropping that definitively sets it in London, Tokyo, and Moscow in 2002.

Science fiction critic Thomas Wagner underscores the desire for meaning, or pattern recognition, using a comparison between the film clips and Cayce's search for her father after the attacks: [T]he very randomness and ineffability of the clips flies in the face of our natural human tendency towards pattern recognition ... [T]he subculture that surrounds "following the footage" ... [is] an effective plot device for underscoring the novel's post-9/11 themes: to wit, the uncertainty of the fabric of day-to-day life people began to feel following that event … [We] as people don't like uncertainty, don't like knowing that there's something we can't comprehend.

[17] The book explores a tension between originality and monoculture by focusing on the artist's relationship with a commercialized world and its marketing of free art and consumer products.

[23] Critic Lisa Zeidner argues that the artist's "loyalty and love"[23] involved with creating originality counters Bigend's assertion that everything is a reflection of something else and that the creative process no longer rests with the individual.

"[25] On the other hand, as Rudy Rucker notes, while new art is constantly threatened by commodification, it is dependent on the monoculture for its launching point and uniqueness.

[26] Gibson's product positioning language and Cayce's analysis of consumerist trends show that society is not a victim of consumerism, but rather its creator who helps shape it without ever stepping outside it.

[28] Postmodern theorist Fredric Jameson calls it "a kind of hyped-up name-dropping ... [where] an encyclopaedic familiarity with the fashions ... [creates] class status as a matter of knowing the score rather than of having money and power".

A science fiction writer must invent the world where the story takes place, often from the ground up, a process usually called world-building.

[20] 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. .

[36] In common with Gibson's previous work, Paul Di Filippo found 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".

Gibson's writing was positively received by science fiction writers Dennis Danvers, Candas Jane Dorsey, and Rudy Rucker.

[16][26][43] Rucker has written: "[w]ith a poet's touch, he tiles words into wonderful mosaics"[26] and Danvers wrote that "no sentence has a subject if it can do without one".

[16] One critic found the prose to be as "hard and compact as glacier ice"[21] and another that it "gives us sharply observed small moments inscribed with crystalline clarity".

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.

[23] Toby Litt wrote that "[j]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".

[52] A film adaptation was initiated in April 2004 with producer Steve Golin's production company Anonymous Content and the studio Warner Bros. Pictures hiring director Peter Weir.