This Week's Reads

Vancouver, B.C.'s Gibson. (Karen Moskowitz)

From the start of William Gibson's latest novel (new in paper), his heroine, Cayce Pollard, finds herself in a 21st-century version of The Crying of Lot 49. Full of portent, information-era philosophy, and the kind of coincidences that suggest a global cabal is at work, Recognition has the international sweep of a James Bond movie. But Gibson's brainy interrogation of media culture promises much more than a sexy spy story.

Fashion diviner Cayce is a "cool hunter" dressed in brand-erased CPUs ("Cayce Pollard Units"), whose allergy to derivative images has made her one of the most sought-after advertising consultants in the global economy. She's been called to London by the Blue Ant agency to review logo proposals for a major athletic-shoe company, but her attention is soon diverted by the release of a new fragment of "the footage," numbered 135.

The footage is a series of short film clips of high quality and indeterminate origin emerging on the Internet. When Blue Ant offers to bankroll an investigation, Cayce, a footage junkie, wants to resist putting a narrative to the fragments. Like all mystery heroines, of course, she can't escape the temptation to find "the maker" and solve the puzzle.

In Recognition, Gibson succeeds most when he refuses to simplify the semiotic mystery that the footage presents (it's a signifier that deliberately resists signification). Yet, as the owner of Blue Ant concludes, it's also "the single most effective piece of guerrilla marketing ever."

Readers, however, will be left unsatisfied with the tidiness of Gibson's finale. While it is comforting to see the pieces finally assembled, Recognition is surprisingly more of a traditional whodunit than Gibson's earlier dialectics suggest. In the end, it becomes an entertaining mystery novel with a philosophical depth that shames the Matrix franchise but falls short of its Pynchon-esque potential. PATRICK O'KELLEY

William Gibson will appear at UW Kane Hall, Room 130 (free tickets required in advance from University Book Store, 206-634-3400), 7 p.m. Tues., Feb. 3.

The gorgon! photo: viking

GORGON: PALEONTOLOGY, OBSESSION, AND THE GREATEST CATASTROPHE IN EARTH'S HISTORY
By Peter Ward (Viking, $27.95)

Yes, it's bad form to launch into reviewing a book on evolution and extinction with a riff on Genesis. But I sometimes suspect that the serpent didn't tempt Eve by promising that she'd be as a god and know good and evil. He snared her with these words: "Wanna write a memoir?"

I know the temptation, and so, I fear, do all too many writers and scientists who have plenty to say about the wider world but bog down in personal reminiscences. Take Peter Ward. As a UW geologist and zoologist, he does interesting work on eons-old topics with real topical urgency: mass extinctions and their causes, how complex organisms and living systems evolve and go poof, and the prospects that they will go poof (likely) and evolve (unlikely) again. As a writer, he bites off topics that are both novel and important. He synthesizes a rare range of specialtiesfrom plate tectonics to the anachronistic biology of the chambered nautilus. When he sticks to the science, he's illuminating. When he speaks, he's engaging.

So why does Ward, like so many others, have to spoil all this by trying to write like a novelist about personal travails that are not the stuff of great fiction? The serpent strikes again.

Ward's subject this time is, as usual, a juicy onethough it went extinct, along with most of its contemporaries, 250 million years ago. The gorgon was a big-headed, saber-toothed, "mammallike" reptile that had dominion over the Earth before dinosaurs arrived, then vanished in an elusive, long-misunderstood catastrophe. It's also Ward's strained "metaphor for the great Permian extinction," the catastrophe in question (though you wouldn't guess if he didn't announce it on page 233).

En route, Ward takes a long slog into the Karoo, a bleak but fossil-rich basin in South Africa that has provided gorgon remains and invaluable clues to the Permian mystery. His ostensible intent is to share the painstaking and unglamorous experience of field paleontology, which would be fine; the actual detective work, the searching and drilling and sifting and speculating, is fascinating. But he buries it in long recitations of the familiar horrors of apartheid and agonies of fieldwork. Chilly nights! Scorching days! Wretched motels! What will they sacrifice for science next? Occasionally, he even lapses into Heart of Darkness soliloquies: "Everything was dusty, and it might just as well have been from the crematorium. I was getting to know Africa; I was breathing Africa."

A Bruce Chatwin or Paul Theroux (speaking of dark hearts) might knit an elegiac meditation on mortality, personal and global, from such stuff. But it's not Ward's m鴩er, and it leaves too little space for what is. Four compressed final chapters update his previous account of the Permian extinction (in Rivers in Time), tie in other strands of Permian research, and propose a new explanation for a catastrophe that may come again. I craved more of this stuff, particularly after Gorgon's tantalizing anticlimax: After all the caroming around the Karoo, it's a student's chance remark on dinosaur lungs that lights Ward's bulb and suggests a breakthrough. It may be worth wading through the travelogue to reach Gorgon's provocative final speculations. Otherwise, I expect Ward will return to the subject, but he might want to get his memoirs out of the way first. ERIC SCIGLIANO