TRP - Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture

[j e l]

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003091189-34/thomas-pynchon-1937%E2%80%93-rob-latham

ABSTRACT

This chapter introduces US author Thomas Pynchon, who was prominently
mentioned in the Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986) by
Bruce Sterling, outlining the literary and cultural influences that had
helped form the cyberpunk ethos, from J.G. Ballard to Alvin and Heidi
Toffler, the hacker underground to hip-hop music. Sterling reserved a
“special admiration for a writer whose integration of technology and
literature remains unsurpassed: Thomas Pynchon” (x). In a 1986 interview
with Larry McCaffery, William Gibson referred to Pynchon as his “mythic
hero,” whose work—especially the 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow—prompted his
interest in “a certain mutant pop culture imagery” fused with “esoteric
historical and scientific information.” Pynchon’s novels are units in an
evolving mosaic, with characters and ideas recurring from book to book, and
with an overarching focus on the tempos and trajectories of western
technoscience as it comes to grasp and command the world. This focus helps
to explain his popularity among the cyberpunks, and within the science
fiction (sf) field more generally, but there is also a pronounced Gothic
strain to his technocultural imaginings.

--jel