OK. I finished Arc d'X

[OUTRSPACIA at aol.com]

If you are a Pynchon fan, then you should read Steve Erickson. I have to
admit.  WHile Tours of the Black Clock is more amazing in a sense, Arc d'X is
fascinating. Symbolic, yes. Allegorical even.

Erickson himself appears as a character.
His earlier novels serve as plot elements.
Earlier Erickson plots/characters/events figure into the telling.
Time rolls back and forth over itself.
Space shifts and slides.
Characters overlap and blur with each other.
Historical figures redefined, reshaped.
"Tyrone Something" appears as a candidate for a character's name.

On page 216, Erickson captures a fundamental "theme" of Gravity's Rainbow in
a paragraph:
"Berlin, once again and for the last time in this century, la at the
crosscoordinates of history's indecision, the final decade of the final
century characterized by dissolution in the East and a contrivance of unity
in the West which barely lasted five minutes beyond the contriving, the
gravity of authority versus the entropy of freedom, the human race's opposing
impulses devouring each other, order consumed by anarchy and then reordering
itself."

There's the chaos thing for you. Strange attractors.
Speaking of which, the plot of every Erickson novel is about strange
attractions, generally between a central, maybe fragmented character who is
often likely to suffer from paranoia, if not other psycho-trumatic states of
mind, who is driven unnaturally by an overwhelming attraction to a mysterious
beautiful woman.
There's a little of that going on in GR, too, as I recall.

Also on page 240, a nice reference to things dissolving, (ala Slothrop in GR)
blurring at the end of time:  "Was he beginning to blur around the edges like
everything else?"

Read on. There's more to Erickson.
It's  a big book and it's less than 300 pages. And it needs more than one
reading.

I have to give credit to ERickson not only for imagining these dreamlike
books that challenge the likes of Borges for mystery and "magical realism"
although I distrust that phrase, but also for throwing out a startling number
of story/plot threads, scattering them over time and space and then weaving
them back together.

Anyway, I'm pretty impressed by this guy's stuff. Too bad it's out of print.
If you know of a source, I'd like to pick up any or all of Erickson's work
for my own library.