Across the Wounded Galaxies

[Dave Monroe]

... and continuing on in Larry McCaffery, ed., Across
the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary
American Science Fiction Writers, (Urbana: U of
Illinois P, 1990) ...

"The postmodernist fiction of Donald Barthelme, Thomas
Pynchon, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, Ronald Sukenick,
Raymond Federman, and others has energetically sought
a formal mens more suitable than traditional realism
to describe our world today.  The same can be said of
the science fiction created by the writers inetrviewed
here." (p. 5)

"Not surprisingly, many of these writers acknowledge a
certain kinship with postmodernist authors (Pynchon,
Burrough, and Barthelme being probably the most
frequently cited)." (p. 6)

"Consider Jorge Luis Borges, Jack Kerouac, Samuel
Beckett, and Thomas Pynchon--authors who changed our
notion of what fiction can be." (p. 31)

"Like J.G. Ballard, Philip K. Dick, and Thomas
Pynchon--three other authors who have had an analogous
impact on SF in the '80s and who were also operating
at the intersection of SF, the avant-garde, and
'serious' fiction ...." (pp. 31-2)

   S[amuel R. ]D[elany]: "Dhalgren has outsold
Gravity's Rainbow by about 100,000 copies--we share a
mass market publisher and statistics leak--but
Gravity's Rainbow is a fantasy about a war most of its
readers don't really remember, whereas Dhalgren is in
fairly pointed dialogue with all the depressed and
burned-out areas of America's great cities.  To decide
if Gravity's Rainbow is relevant, you have to spend
time in a library--mostly with a lot of Time/Life
books, which are pretty romanticized to begin with. 
To see what Dhalgren is about, you only have to walk
along a mile of your own town's inner city.  So
Dhalgren's a bit more threatening--and accordingly
receives less formal attention." (p. 85)

   T[homas M. ]D[isch]: "I have never liked Pynchon. 
I simply can't stand his tone of voice.  It's like
having a food allergy--I can read a paragraph of
Pynchon and break out in a rash." (p. 112)

"... the sophisticated blend of science, history, pop
culture, hip lingoes, and dark humor in Thomas
Pynchon's work." (p. 131)

"Probably as much as any first novel since Pynchon's
V., Neuromancer seemed to create a significant
synthesis of poetics, pop culture, and technology."
(ibid.)

   W[illiam ]G[ibson]: "... the 'admirably complex'
way that you find in Pynchon's novels ..." (p. 134)

   WG: "Pynchon has been a favorite writer and an
influence all along.  In many ways I see him as almost
the start of a certain mutant breed of SF--the
cyberpunk thing, the SF that mixes surrealism and pop
culture imagery with esoteric historical and
scientific information.  Pynchon is a kind of mythic
hero of mine,and I suspect that if you talk with a lot
of recent SF writers you'll find tehy've all read
Gravity's Rainbow several times and have been very
much influenced by it.  I was into Pynchon early on--I
remember seeinga New York Times review of V. when it
first came out--I was just a kid--and thinking, Boy,
that sounds like some really weird shit!" (p. 138)

   WG: "... I've imagined a world in which Pynchon
sold his early stories to Fantasy and Science Fiction
and became an alternate Dick." (p. 139)

   Q: "Several aspects of Always Coming Home--your use
of teh rainbow as a symbol, the way in which you seem
to explore the masculine impulse to attain a certain
control of our environment--made us wonder if you
intended the book to be, in part, a response to Thomas
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow."
   U[rsula K. ]L[eGuin]: "I've never read Pynchon."
(pp. 172-3)

"It's no accident, for instance, that seminal figures
in postmodernism--William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard,
Andy Warhol, Thomas Pynchon, the Velvet Underground
and 70s punk musicians, filmmakers such as David
Cronenberg and Ridley Scott, performance artists like
Laurie Anderson and the Survival Research Lab--are all
frequently cited by cyberpunk authors as having
affinities with their own work." (p. 212)

B[ruce ]S[terling]: "Right now I'm really interseted
in something trhat doesn't have a name--I suspect that
when it does, it will carry considerable pent-up
force, the same way 'cyberpunk' did.  I read novels
taht deal with the terminology and the tenets and the
cultural territory of SF but aren't genre material. 
Pynchon is the obvious exemplar of that, a guy who has
won literary awards when his books are actually about
the military-industrial complex and the ideology of
Werner Von Braun, who aimed at the stars and hit
London.  There are a surprising number of writers
working in that whole complex of things that Pynchon
discusses." (p. 225)

http://www.press.uillinois.edu/pre95/0-252-16140-3.html

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