Seduced by the name of William Gibson peering out at me from the science fiction and fantasy shelves in my local library the other week, I picked up, took home and read Pattern Recognition. It took a while to get into but eventually I did to a limited extent, always waiting for the twist. It was only when I'd got to the end that I realised the library had been seduced by the name, too, and there was in fact not the tiniest hint of science fiction in it; it was a zeitgeist novel which could almost have been written by Douglas Coupland. Nothing wrong with Coupland (if my limited experience of his work is anything to go by) but that wasn't the kind of book I was in the mood for at the time. Maybe Iain Banks has the right idea with the careful separation of manstream and sci-fi by means of his middle initial. William Gibson himself has said he doesn't agree with the separation, and I'm sure I've said before that I'd prefer every work of fiction in the bookshop or library to be arranged alphabetically, regardless of genre. However, given that genre categorisation does exist, I'd rather I could trust it.