SciFi elements in "Gravity's Rainbow"?

[Dave Monroe]

On Sun, Aug 21, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Tom Beshear <tbeshear at insightbb.com> wrote:

> Well, it was nominated for the Nebula Award for best novel given by the
> Science Fiction Writers of America. It didn't win (insufficiently sf? tho'
> more likely voters were literarily and politically too conservative). Within
> the broad set of sf, besides the alternate history is a subset called the
> secret history. Perhaps Gravity's Rainbow fits better in that area.

The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction
by
Jonathan Lethem

In 1973 Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow was awarded the Nebula, the
highest honor available in the field once known as "science fiction" -
a term now mostly forgotten.

Sorry, just dreaming. In our world Bruce is dead, while Bob Hope
lurches on. And though Gravity's Rainbow really was nominated for the
1973 Nebula, it was passed over for Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With
Rama, which commentator Carter Scholz rightly deemed "less a novel
than a schematic diagram in prose." Pynchon's nomination now stands as
a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that science fiction
was about to merge with the mainstream.

[...]

http://web.archive.org/web/20070814143639/http://www.verysilly.org/lethem/lethems_vision.html

Things Are Tough All Over
by Ray Davis
(originally published in The New York Review of Science Fiction)

I have a quarrel and a disagreement with Jonathan Lethem's "Why Can't
We All Just Live Together?" piece [published by NYRSF, but earlier
semi-randomly cut, retitled "The Squandered Promise of Science
Fiction," and published by the Village Voice].

[...]

http://www.pseudopodium.org/kokonino/jlvls.html

Mistakes Were Made: An Exchange

Ray Davis & Jonathan Lethem

http://www.pseudopodium.org/repress/shorts/Davis_and_Lethem-Mistakes_Were_Made.html

In 1998, the Village Voice published an essay by Jonathan Lethem
titled "Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction"
which begins with an alternative history in which Thomas Pynchon's
Gravity's Rainbow was voted the 1973 Nebula Award by the Science
Fiction Writers of America. In fact, though Pynchon's landmark work of
postmodern fiction was indeed nominated for the Nebula that year, the
award went to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. Lethem called
this moment "a tombstone marking the death of the hope that science
fiction was about to merge with the mainstream."

http://www.znaksagite.com/diskusije/index.php?PHPSESSID=26891a4e977e7d001d9aa7d44da3cbd1&topic=8486.msg220930#msg220930

The Secret History of Science Fiction

http://www.tachyonpublications.com/book/Secret_History_of_SF.html