New Pynchon Book Theory

[nick gardner]

I have heard that the new book will be set around or in 1897 in
Chicago.  It's not a very obvious timeframe for much, least of all for
Sofia Kovalevskaya, who died years earlier in Europe, or the serial
killer thing, although, who knows maybe he could still fit it in.  I'm
assuming that even if the book is set in 1897, that flashbacks
included could subsume quite a range of events, including the serial
killer thing, world fair of religions thing, etc.
  I had the idea that this new book might be about cars.  It may be a
stretch, but humor me.  An article detailing an 1895 race in Chicago
referred to it as the "race of the century," one of the first versions
of motorcar racing (or, as in 1895 the cars were called "motocycles")
which was a major turning point in, at least Chicago, the fate of the
automobile.
Karl Benz invented the carburetor, speed regulation system,
accelorator, ignition, battery, spark plug, clutch, gear shift and
radiator.  It was the Germans, particularly Siegried Marcus, Gottlieb
Daimler, and Karl Benz who made the most signifigant acheivements
toward creating the automobile between 1890-1900, forshadowing German
rocket scientists by half a century.  It is also possible that the car
would be a link to back to Kovalevskaya, who was active in Germany as
a mathematician at the same time.  Might her ideas, the most important
ones of which were about mechanics, or her masterpiece work concerning
the mathematics of a wheel rotating around a fixed point, have
something to do with the lofty ideas of other German mechanics at that
time?
     Many automobiles were mocked as being ridiculous by people
through the 1890s.  And they topped out at about 11 miles per hour, so
that seems like fair, justifiable mockery.  By 1905 however,
autombiles were being produced on a grand scale and the first major
era, the brass era, of cars were created.  What happened in between?
What did the face of the automobile look like when Americans fell in
love with it for the first time?  How did cars come from nowhere to
fifty years later entitling the "beat" generation to being On the
Road, to a worldwide problem of air pollution which may be the biggest
environmental threat to our planet, not to mention the subtextual
motivations for the war in Iraq and "on terror"?  There is also the
whole collusion between car industies and the defense department
during the war and in the years leading up to the highway commisions
which paved America in the late forties, early fifties which Pyncon
would be familiar with from his research on GR.  There are some
grandiose amplifications here for Pynchon to work with, not to mention
the patent(ed) absurdity of early experimental cars, planes, etc.
The more I think about this the more it seems like a Pynchon book, but
I'm done thinking about it for a while.  Anybody else have thoughts on
this?