This weeks New Scientist...

[Basileios Drolias]

Thomas Pynchon is mentioned in this weeks New Scientist in a review by 
paul Murdin of a book called 'from Faust to Strangelove: Representations 
of the scientist in western literature' by Roslynn D. Haynes

`Perhaps the most favourable image of the scientist in fiction is the 
dedicated idealist, whose discoveries hold out the prospect of Utopia. 
This image originated from the iconography, bordering on hagiography, of 
Isaac Newton. By a large extrapolation, Newton's work held out the 
prospect of arranging life in an optimum way, if only the predictive 
mathematics proved tractable.
This ideal was challenged scientifically by quantum mechanics, as 
expressed in Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and by chaos theory, as 
discussed on stage in Tom Stoppard's Arcadia.....'

basil. 


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                    We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
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