TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

[Matthew Cissell]

Alice,
 Thanks for laying the cards down straight. But what do you make of one poster's comment that it (TP's work) "looked like SF" of the time e.g. Female Man, Crash, etc? And what do you make of TP's comment in the intro. to SL that he thought he was "sophisticating the Beat spirit with second-hand science"?

Of course the man himself calls his work "historiographic fiction" in the letter he wrote for Ian McEwen, but who ever let an author decide what his or her work meant or was classified as?

mc





________________________________
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Saturday, June 23, 2012 5:44 PM
Subject: Re: TP and Nabakov doing SF that isn't

Pynchon hasn't written any science fiction.

> What do you want it to be?

> In other words, whether it's genre or literature, is a matter of audience
> reception.