Circumstantial evidence for a Pynchon-influenced story

[Mark Kohut]

First, we have all heard of Zamyatin's WE and its influencing of
1984 and other anti-utopian/totalitarian savaging works. Some P-listers
have even read it, I think, but I have not. A scholar (or more) has written something
about TRPjr. and Zamyatin, I think I remember; and remember not reading it since
I did not know WE. 

Yesterday, while waiting for public transportion to a July 4th bust, I took a book
I had been given just to discover something new, serendipitous. The book is
The Portable Russaian Reader.

Zamyatin is in it. I learn from the two-page intro about him that he was science-minded
and trained as an engineer!. (second bit of evidence that TRP musta discovered him back in the 
vision-forming day). This intro also states that his themes included energy vs. entropy (as metaphor, etc.)
Wow, I'm thinking excitedly, never knew.  

The story in the book is called "The Cave". 1922. It is set in some kind of post-apocalyptic future......
where people's living quarters (apartment-like; condo-like) are seen as kind of pre-city, neanderthal-like
caves.......and there are two main couples inhabiting different caves. One couple is out of wood, apartment stripped
and the male tries to barter/beg/borrow/steal some from the other before heat-death sets in!....

No story spoliers here, but Entropy, Pynchon's prize-winning story, come to anyone else's mind? 

Let me also state the circumstantial case by saying that "seige" as a thrown-off metaphor is used. (Remember AtD?)
A-and an imagined creature not unlike Godzilla, maybe, also plays a (conceptual) role.

Love that TRPjr IF...or if not. 



P.S. Ron Rosenbaum has written that only two writers, Shakespeare and Nabokov are, for him, endlessly rereadable 'cause ALWAYS full of new perceptions.  Too elitist and narrow for me, BUT, even in his rarified way, I say he has
not yet read all of Pynchon well enough to exclude him from this judgment.