I'm surprised at the comment of PR being unlike his other works... I feel that he has been drifting off a bit into commercial territory since VL (Altho I have enjoyed them all since)... The Sprawl Cycle was more gritty, arty, and I guess I would characterize PR as being more artistic than the Bridge Trilogy (Is that what we're calling them? I can't remember.) I don't think that one needs to read any of his prior works before pattern recognition, altho I'm biased as I've read them all. Don't get me wrong, Gibson is my favorite author and Neuromancer has been my favorite novel since I was a kid.

Everything is an old idea, but Gibson's approach is _not_ different, which you will definitely notice if you read the article. The phrase "cool hunter" and the methods Gladwell used to describe exactly how somebody determines (or rather intuits) what is cool are exactly similar to Gibson's description of what Cayce does, and how.

Gibson also lifted a description of curta calculators pretty much verbatim. I discovered this when I was obsessed with them some months back. You can ascertain this for yourself also with a brief google session.

One of things I've always admired about Gibson is that he's a consummate cool hunter himself--he has an incredibly sharp eye for currents of fashion. But for the most part, he records; he does not originate. Neuromancer is a counter-example, since some of the earlier development and conception of the net as a subversive frontier in the early '90s came from that book.

Ideas circulate, is all. They don't come from any one place. He _knows_ that--hence the obsessive hunts for creative origins in most of his books: the Cornell box artist in Count Zero, the Intelligence in Mona Lisa Overdrive, the author of the footage in Pattern Recognition--all of which turn out to be literary McGuffins, as origins, as it turns out, are never really original.