Riemann space

[Monte Davis]

> she might have found the Tristero anywhere 
> in her Republic, through any of a hundred lightly-concealed 
> entranceways, a hundred alienations, if only she'd looked.

It's old, old magic that another world with different rules is just a step
away -- under Elf Hill or at the bottom of the garden, perceptible or even
accessible if one stands (as Forster said of Cavafy) "at a slight angle to
the universe."

The vein Pynchon works so well is the tension built into the nature of
science, the science of nature. On the one hand it keeps turning up weird
and wonderful new stuff that might as well be magic at first blush...

And on the other, it works relentlessly to *assimilate* the new stuff into
an expanding, rigorously consistent scheme, insisting that there is *one*
world with *one* set of rules. And it's  precisely that stone deterministic
rigor that allows it to keep the magic coming -- to predict invisible waves
or time dilation or genes or black holes or bizarre quantum phenomena before
they're observed.

Notice how T.W.I.T., just like The White Visitation, presents a gallery with
the whole range -- from the crackpots and fringers who cherry-pick just
enough Weird Science to pump up the magic they want to believe anyway, to
the mournful Roger Mexico types who've worked through all the equations and
lost the magic along the way.