fantasy or ?

[Dave Monroe]

>From Thomas Pynchon, "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?," NY
Times, Sunday, October 28th, 1984 ...

"But if we do insist upon fictional violations of the
laws of nature - of space, time, thermodynamics, and
the big one, mortality itself - then we risk being
judged by the literary mainstream as Insufficiently
Serious. Being serious about these matters is one way
that adults have traditionally defined themselves
against the confidently immortal children they must
deal with. [...] It is not the only neighborhood in
the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely
defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In
romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we
know better. We say, 'But the world isn't like that.'
These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to
fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get
redlined under the label 'escapist fare.' 

"This is especially unfortunate in the case of science
fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one
of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent
and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just
as important as the Beat movement going on at the same
time, certainly more important than mainstream
fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been
paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and
McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis
of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to
have been one of the principal refuges, in our time,
for those of Luddite persuasion."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html

"He is wholly familiar with opera; his Ford Foundation
fellowship application had expressed his desire to
write comic opera and to 'adapt contemporary American
Science Fiction to the operatic stage.'"

http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/bio/influences.html

"Anthroresearch Associates in Maiden Lane, New York,
where V.'s Benny Profane becomes a night watchmen and
meets the manikin's, seems a nod to the Alfred
Bester's The Demolished Man. There a guard works in a
Maiden Lane bank. Benny found his job at the
Space/Time Employment Agency, chapter sixteen of The
Demolished Man includes 'Space/d! Time' in the
first paragraph. Bester's novel was the basis for a
1959 opera libretto that Pynchon proposed to the Ford
Foundation for financial backing. The grant
application was denied."

http://web.archive.org/web/20000301093251/http://pynchonfiles.com/shock.htm

--- Kyle Winkler <taos_hum1 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> i am trying to decide if i think he IS or IS NOT a
> dreamlike/fantasy/somewhere-in-that-kind-of-genre
> writer. i know we all see the parts of his novels
> and stories that take on that certain kind of flare
> when we all go.."what the f*@!! did that really
> happen?! that is impossible!" of course, just stop
> reading and take a look at the name on the cover and
> you will be reminded of why you read him. maybe what
> i am trying to say is that i see reality and (i am
> using fantasy for lack of a better term right now)
> fantasy, or how about un-reality? in his works..as i
> know we all do, but is he an un-reality writer as
> such?

Point is, consider Pynchon in the context of postwar,
esp. "New Wave," science fiction ...

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