I started reading this after being taken in at the bookstore by the first page, which, as in other Gibson books, is memorable. Here is one sentence on that page: “Nothing at all in the German fridge, so new that it’s interior smells only of cold and long-chain monomers.”
The story is about the search for the maker of “the footage”, a collection of snippets from a movie which is being released anonymously on the internet. The snippets are released in random order. Fans of the footage reassemble the snippets to form their own movie, applying their own pattern recognition. This is the only book of fiction that I know of to discuss watermarking of video.
The rest of the book doesn’t live up to the first page. In fact, it drags and is often tedious. It would have been good to cut about 50-100 pages. Gibson’s style is not particularly easy to follow. It’s a lot like reading emails from a busy, self-absorbed geek.
I’ve read glowing reviews of this book and its meaning on the internet. The book would be worth those reviews had it been better written and motivated.