Deflating Hyperspace

[Daniel Harper]

On Monday 02 April 2007 05:37, you wrote:
> Joseph T.
>
> > I personally think Pynchon is less interested in coordinating  a sci-
> > fi multiverse than in exploring this very real interaction between
> > fiction and reality...
>
> Word -- this and the companion post both. I like science fiction, and was
> certainly shaped in important ways by reading mostly SF from age 10 into my
> 20s. I'm as far as anyone could be from asserting any programmatic "there
> we have serious literature, and over here we have lightweight escapist
> genre stuff..."
>
> But time machine and hollow earth and all, AtD simply isn't SF to me in any
> useful sense -- no more than it's a Zane Grey western, a Black Mask
> detective story about hard-boiled Lew Basnight, or (later) a Henry James
> tale of a fresh American princess in Venetian drawing rooms. Its "what
> ifs?" are central -- but posed from a radically different angle than the
> "what ifs?" of SF.

I would agree that ATD (and M&D, for that matter) is not science fiction, but 
I think Pynchon's work in general, and ATD in specific, benefits from the 
kind of reading that science fiction readers take in stride. (And by this, I 
mean "real" science fiction -- Star Wars books and the like are fine for what 
they are, but I don't consider them to be science fiction in the same way 
that _I, Robot_ or _Ender's Game_ is.) Science fiction readers, particularly 
when reading something that was published years before, have to be very 
conscious of the scientific and historical context in which the book was 
written.

To use a famous example, in one of Asimov's SF mysteries, the solution depends 
on a certain character's having lived on Mercury, and in a moment of panic 
setting photographic film outside, which was then destroyed when the sun 
rose. The reason the Mercurian did so was because his planet does not rotate 
on its axis relative to the sun, always keeping one side pointed towards it, 
much like our moon is in tidal lock with us.

Of course, Mercury actually _does_ rotate on its axis relative to the sun, but 
at the time the story was written, it was thought that Mercury was tidally 
locked. Being an SF reader from the time I was old enough to know what SF 
was, I instinctively look at publication dates and place stories into context 
in a way that I'm not sure those unfamiliar with the medium are quite as 
comfortable with -- Pynchon's work rewards such contextualizing in spades.

(The Asimov story is "The Dying Night" and can be found in _Asimov's 
Mysteries_, btw -- I had to dig out my copy.)

-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com