GR: In the Zone....it seems the concept of The Zone is/was

[Joseph Tracy]

Interesting read. One could see the internet as a Zone that opened up to alien ideas and where new social models and connections were burgeoning, and which is now well along the way to being brought under control of the ruling powers as we watch the Orwellian torture of an unaffiliated publisher of imperial secrets, and the role of social media in aligning with the state.  Pynchon’s Zone concept  seems to me to go further back than GR and is evident in V and COL 49. I woild say that Huxley's Brave New World has a large zone while 1984 restricts it to the minds of a few. Pynchon does not restrict Zone type effects to resistance to authorities. There is in his Zones an implication of somethng like what the New Testament calls principalities and powers, that is, of a range of mythic or spiritual arenas that intersect with events on earth ( Thanatoids, Time travelers, Vheissu, the rainbow in GR, the multidimensional  V,  karmic adjustors,   anarchists, hollow earth and various underground worlds, Shangri La, the icy ray man from the arctic, the cactus visions, the Light, the doubling of the light via crystals, Pythagorean spirituality, Orpheus and Jazz to mention a few).   
    The writer talks about zones as areas that imply opposition to totalitarian tendencies.  In my own thoughts on that topic  I see  a tendency  for most people to think of totalitarians as other than whatever we identify with (  Russian,  Chinese, Islamic, anti imperialist, for the West.  Western amoral globalists  for Muslims Russia etc.) . This is increasingly to the advantage of the smaller and smaller group who control more and more of planetary wealth. Nevertheless, control is never complete and the Orwellian wars for control continue even as it increasingly becomes a war with the earth itself, war having become the most universal paradigm of self preservation and social/economic/political control.

> On Jan 19, 2023, at 4:09 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> a solid science fiction trope, a burgeoning one, even as GR was being
> written. Ballard, the Strugatsky Brothers (72),
> Harrison and others. Reliable Marxist critic Jameson picked up on
> it.[Seems such a concept let some leftists criticize social reality and get
> read
> in a genre many Leftists dismissed. Some say]
> 
>  Here is a section from
> a book which locates Pynchon as perhaps the touchstone of postwar meanings
> with his Zone. No one's
> in Kansas anymore.....[I love this guy who says, "reality is good to think
> with" as he creates his real "fantasy" zone.]
> 
> https://www.google.com/books/edition/Gothic_Science_Fiction_1980_2010/2moiuQaoq94C?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=What+is+The+Zone+in+Gravity%27s+Rainbow%3F&pg=PA25&printsec=frontcover
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>