Pynchon-Gibson Connection

[meikle at mail.utexas.edu]

I must confess I'm glad to see JDL turning away from IJ, whatever its
merits, and back to TRP.
One of the key inspirations for Gibson's Neuromancer seems to come from pp.
698-699 (Viking ed.) of Gravity's Rainbow, where Tyrone's Pop, who sounds
weirdly like Andy Sipowitz of NYPD Blue (here's Pop on his own generation's
use of dope:  "Well we got off on some pretty good 'vacations' we called
them then, some pretty 'weird' areas they got us into 's a matter of
fact--"), warns his son about "screwing in," about "shooting electricity
into head":  "Suppose someday you just plug in and go away and never come
back?"  To which Tyrone replies, "Ho, ho!  Don't I wish!  What do you think
every electrofreak dreams about?...  Maybe there *is* a Machine to take us
away, take us completely, suck us out through the electrodes out of the
skull 'n' into the Machine and live there forever with all the other souls
it's got stored there....  Dope never gave *you* immortality.  *You* hadda
come back, every time, into a dying hunk of smelly *meat!*  But *We* can
live forever, in a clean, honest, purified Electroworld--"  There it is
foax:  Gibson's Wintermute and the Sprawl, his cyberspace and meat world,
Pynchon's hothouse and street updated for the millennium.
And we're all wondering if indeed it will have to remain true, as
Pop/Sipowitz claims, that "you always do come back to old Realityland,
don't you."
I've got nowhere to go with this parallel, just felt like backing up JDL's
observation and typing out some of ol' Tom's immortal words.

Jeff Meikle