Pynchon and computers

[Oliver Xymoron]

On Tue, 22 Aug 1995, Jan Klimkowski wrote:

> Stirred into rereading the piece -  which contains some very interesting 
> thoughts on Science Fiction - I still feel that Pynchon is identifying the 
> fact that by the early 1980s the CounterCulture was being irreversibly 
> seduced by the potential of Technology to liberate rather than oppress.  And 
> by the apparent impossibility and futility of taking a genuinely 
> oppositional position against something which increasingly determines all 
> aspects of our lives.
> 
> However, if I had to place a bet as to his own feelings, I would agree with 
> Andrew and say that the Pynchon of the article was still siding with those 
> Luddites....

I find very little in the article to suggest that Pynchon has an irrational
fear of technology to any degree. Looking back, modernization was a popular
fear in 1984. Everyone was going to be replaced by computers or robots in
manufacturing, just as the original Luddites had been. This fear has since
ebbed, and has ben replaced by NAFTA, GATT, etc. and I don't remember it
surfacing even in Vineland(1990, off the top of my head). I remmber being 
pleased with technology present in Vineland, being a technophile, and 
especially by his ruminations on the independent life of information ("If 
each life were represented by a 1, each death..").

As for Pynchon and typewriters, word processors are not in all ways an
improvement. Back when Byte magazine was still a hacker rag, Jerry Pournelle
described trying to get Frank Herbert to use a word processor (I think it was
a Kaypro).  Mr. Herbert was impressed but couldn't work with it because it
didn't save his intermediate ramblings. He wanted everything preserved. It is
extremely easy to edit yourself on a computer, something that's potentially
dangerous to a writing style developed on a typewriter. As someone who liked
to chew on mommy's stacks of punch cards as a child, and who's never written
anything longer than a page without a full-screen editor, I can barely type a
complete sentence on a typewriter, it's not forgiving enough. 

ps: I was also pleased by the appearance of the Thanatoids in VL, as they 
were an obvious match (despite one or two glaring differences) for the 
nihilistic young subculture I find myself in. In California, they're 
known as goths, here in Minneapolis, the term darksider is prefered. It's 
interesting to me that TRP created the Thanatoids and coined a name for 
them, apparently unaware that such people already existed. 

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