Hubertus Bigend

Pattern Recognition '' to that of actor Tom Cruise "on a diet of virgins' blood and truffled chocolates". from the perspective of protagonist Cayce Pollard: Bigend hires Pollard to track down the source of haunting film fragments known as "the footage" that have been appearing anonymously online, the exploitation of the art as a marketable commodity. Bigend and Blue Ant benefit from Pollard's work both by the discovery of the origin of the footage and by a relationship he establishes with a Russian oligarch. In Spook Country, it is revealed that Bigend successfully harnesses the footage to sell shoes. Thus, Bigend appears as the backer of the ethereal magazine. Of Bigend, Henry is told that "he doesn't want you to have heard of him". Zero History Bigend again featured prominently in Zero History, Gibson's 2010 follow-up to Spook Country, again as the employer of Hollis Henry. In it, he wears a suit in the color International Klein Blue which he likes because it is a color that cannot be represented on most computer monitors. == Critical impression ==

Bigend is described by Times Union reviewer Michael Janairo as a "hyper-connected, ever curious, multigazillionaire", and by biopunk writer Paul Di Filippo as amoral and egocentric. Other appellations include "imperious" (SFGate), "pontifical Belgian ad mogul" (The Village Voice), "filthy-rich man-behind-the-curtain" (Seattle Times), "untrustworthy corporate spiv" (The Guardian), "accentless Machiavellian fixer with unnervingly white teeth" (New Statesman), and "information-sucking android-like advertising guru and godgame magus" (John Clute, Sci Fi Weekly). Academic Alex Wetmore identified a parallel between the relationships of Bigend and Cayce Pollard and that of Case, the protagonist of Gibson's Neuromancer (1984) and the entity which recruits him, characterizing both Bigend and Case's recruiter as "mysterious and potentially untrustworthy". Wetmore observes that Bigend "espouses a curiously communal and transnational approach to marketing" compared to that of the money-hungry dot-commers whose frontier individualism the corporate universe has rejected in favour of the Bigendian approach. The character of Bigend thus represents for Wetmore "a shift in the nature of capitalism and, consequently, a change in the way postindustrial technologies deployed by capitalism interact with the self." ==Footnotes==

• List of fictional anti-heroes • Endianness == Citations ==