TRP's next book?

[Brian D. McCary]

Perhaps we should be asking: why must there be *another* book?

I feel that GR was the successfull culmination of a series of
efforts to present his view of the world to the rest of us.  This
view drew on structures adapted from the scientific wnd engineering
advancements over the last century.  His root message, as interpreted 
by me, is that these models and structures explain alot about the 
behavior of systems, including systems of people and systems of
human effort.  Once you view the world within these terms, a
number of unexpected conclusions may be drawn, which, amazingly
enough, correlate fairly well with everyday experience.  Like Maxwell
before him, he relies on an ether for the development of his theory,
in this case the cabalistic "Them" of Slothrop's paranoid perceptions.
The existance of his ether is certainly open to debate (who can
play Michelson to Pynchon's Maxwell?) but the theory works, and will
survive any successful effort to discredit the etheral existance.

The fact that he communicated this approach so well in a fictional
medium is a credit to him as a writer.  But it also raises the question
of other possible thematic bases.  In Vineland, his writing is
as good as in GR, the characters are argueably better (at least 
his females are much more three dimensional) and the storyline is 
solid, but the thematic idea pinning it all together appears
to be a scrap off the cutting room floor for the counterforce section of
GR.  A Mason-Dixon line book will probably echo the same theme of GR and
Vineland, which would make it unnecessary.

TRP examined the singularity of the century through the lens of it's most 
important philisophical advances in GR.  What, exactly, would he have to
do to write a "masterwork"?


Brian McCary
Storz Instruments
bdm at storz.com