Eps 2: Thomas Pynchon and science fiction
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Dylan Stephens
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Which is a pity, because Thomas Pynchon is a phenomenal writer, one who was clever enough to make the world go away. He is one of those writers whose monstrous reputation precedes them, like Neil Stephenson.
The easiest way to look at Pynchon's work is through entropy - the concept of the dissolution of things - and it is no coincidence that he began writing his first published work after reading Asimov's last question. Pyncheson's general concern about entropy, paranoia, and communication may have had a fruitful effect on SF writers, but there is something deeper and more compelling about them, something more universal than the hard rain he predicted.
Since the mid-1960s, Pynchon has been delivering blurb texts and introductions to a wide range of novels and non-fiction. The encyclopedic nature of his novels has led to attempts to connect his work with the short-lived hypertext fiction of the 1990s. Since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow in 1973, PYNCHON's place in American literature has been the subject of heated debate.
Pynchon's most famous novel is his third, Gravity's Rainbow, published in 1973. A complex and allusive fiction that combines many of the themes of his earlier works, including bias, paranoia, racism, colonialism, conspiracy, synchronicity and entropy. books, scholarly articles, online concordances and discussions of the art of the work. His eight published works cover World War II, drugs, the 1970s in Los Angeles and 18th-century London, but not all are science fiction, though some of his best works do.
Pynchon employed a changeable narrative strategy, bouncing from plot to plot, each one recycled from historical fragments. Old genres, old sanctuaries of SF interest that are appreciated or destroyed in thousands of pages, include the Airship Boy Story , the alternative world history with the balloon, the thriller about a world threatened by disaster, the Edisonade , the history of war, the story of a hollowed out world, the scientific romance, But he avoided the traditional nineteenth-century literary text in favour of more ephemeral forms of popular fiction rendered not in historical retrospect, but in the light of contradictory and irrational contemporary discourses for today.15 A reasonable starting point is his Trespasser in which a mysterious intruder hovers over the canvas and it seems as if two important points of the novel materialize.
Pynchon places these questions at the forefront of his work and life. It should come as no surprise to readers who have been churning through novel dialogues and pulp-fiction storylines that he finds reason to engage in four-dimensional discourse with Hinton, Abbott, and Wells. In The Introduction to Slow Learner, he says the same thing about Jack Kerouac.
While most of these books are set in a non-science fiction atmosphere, Pynchon's work is certainly a science fiction book. He deals with the game, and the elements that contribute to the game are the symbolic networks of meaning created by his play of allusions. He makes Wellsian's choice of words easy in a clumsy exchange of punches.
Pynchon won the Faulkner Foundation Prize for his first novel of the year in 1963, a whimsical and absurd story of a middle-aged Englishman in search of elusive supernatural adventurers that emerge in various forms at a critical stage in European history. His next novel, Vineland, began in California in 1984, but was not published until 1990.
Another aspect of Thomas Pynchon's ancestry and family background that inspired his literary work is the Slothrop family history which is related to the short story Secret Integration and Gravitys Rainbow . Jules Siegel claimed that his wife Chrissie made a fictional Shirley Temple impression in Gravity's Rainbows Bianca, referring to a case in which she pulled her shirt from a moving vehicle to attract the attention of another motorist, Jessica, and that GR was his actual ancestor, William Pyn Chynchon, as suggested by the GR character William Slothrops.
When Sale brings up his work, the notion that the content of his set takes on a form suggests a similarity between his design and the outlines of Pynchon's work, but there is a difference between the things in Saless's outline and the things in Pynchon's design scene. Since Pynchingon's sketch in Sales Act II, Scene 1, is a description of being lost in a vast, solitary, vast space, it is likely that it is based on the content of a scene in a sketch draft of a particular scene, and that we have two versions of a sketch playing out in the same setting.
My first reading Gravitys Rainbow is about a top secret intelligence group working in London with all sorts of weird and wacky ideas and theories from World War II. Minstrel Island is an unreleased and unfinished musical written by Thomas Pynchon and his friend John Kirkpatrick Sales while studying at Cornell University.