Fwd: Asimov and Pynchon

[Joseph Tracy]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: 	Re: Asimov and Pynchon
Date: 	Sun, 3 May 2026 12:49:17 -0400
From: 	Joseph Tracy <coypoet at mailfence.com>
Organization: 	www.brooksideglassworks.com
To: 	Corbeau Castrum <filsducorbeau at pm.me>



The thing about entropy is this: If everything is by the nature of the 
physics of the Universe winding down( moving to a state of lower 
energy), what is the force that wound all those systems up and how could 
there not be, along with entropy, an anti-entropic movement ?  Death 
looks entropic, but without it there could be no evolutionary 
adaptation. Also individual organisms have over time reproduced and 
spread and interacted with other organisms to create a total ecological 
system of enormous complexity. Of course humans are reverse engineering 
the whole thing on behalf of the shareholders and CEOs of Acme Ink,

Paul and Calvin  and to large degree Isaac Newton, who I once played 
tennis with and have to admit he barely beat me, imagined
the universe to be made and ordered by an absolute monarch who 
accidentally made a demonic angel who organized an attempted overthrow 
but was defeated by the monarch's son, who had his own disagreements 
with Yahweh,  when the son, modestly calling himself a son of Adam who 
came to bear witness to the truth, took down Satan in a sneaky 
sacrificial offering and resurrection.  Interesting story. More than a 
few chess games have been won in similar fashion.

Anyway the whole Biblical model is CEO heavy and deeply suffused with 
the paranoia of big shots claiming to own everything with a lot of legal 
forms, debt obligations, divinely assembled armies and so forth all 
backed up by threats of everlasting torture for anyone who thinks it 
sounds  like hocum.

  Isaac Newton was born in an age of invention and expanding colonial 
kingdoms. Liebniz and Descartes  envisioned the Universe as a giant 
perfect machine needing no maintenance, but Newton saw flaws in the 
machine and thought intelligent intervention might be needed from time 
to time like every machine known to man. He wanted to understand the 
rules of the physical universe which he saw as tactically advantageous 
and personally  satisfactory to his supremely curious mind. To do this 
requires looking at physical realities as though they  are entirely the 
result of absolute laws discernible by careful experiment.  He basically 
ignored the possibility of understanding how the order came into being( 
God, the king  did it) and focused on how the order worked, how it could 
be codified in ratios, and logical proofs.

It turns out that when you look at physical systems this way it is easy 
to measure the loss of energy in those systems and impossible to  
measure how the order and energy got there and whether it is still 
active. Entropy is still an enormously useful concept for not being 
wasteful and one we are ignoring at our peril, still favoring colonial 
theft, fossil fuel addiction. and warring empires backed by nuclear 
hell. But very technologically advanced, whatever that means.

Perhaps if Isaac N. had focused on biological life he would have seen 
the origin of cosmic  order differently, full of recyclying, self 
transformation, heritable traits encoded in biological memory, 
de-centered  interdependence  leading to  a complex mix of cooperation, 
predation and self defense  resulting in mutual benefit and multiple 
orders of being. A world shaped by the shapeless possibilities of water, 
air, plasma, time, minerals, salts, galactic spin   all sharing an 
animating consciousness without any need of supreme rulers.









On 5/1/26 11:31 AM, Corbeau Castrum via Pynchon-l wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I recently acquired an Everyman Library's edition of Isaac Asimov's 
> Foundation trilogy, and in the introduction Michael Dirda makes some 
> very interesting comments:
>
> "Pulp-magazine heroes traditionally save the day, or the universe. But 
> where is the place for heroes against the 'dead hand' of the Seldon 
> Plan? If the concatenation of myriad forces, carefully analyzed by 
> Hari Seldon, determines outcomes, what of individual effort? In 
> essence, psychohistory recalls Calvinist theology: If God, or Seldon, 
> rules, then one should simply trust in his wisdom, bow to 
> circumstances, and know that all is ineluctably predestined" (xiv).
>
> The fact that psychohistory is a statistical science of prediction 
> which produces a Calvinist-esque fatalism is very reminiscent of much 
> in Gravity's Rainbow. Pynchon for his part references Asimov in the 
> introduction to Slow Learner as one of the people whom he read on the 
> topic of entropy. I briefly searched for essays and articles 
> connecting the two but couldn't find anything. My thoughts are still 
> churning about how the two might relate to each other. What do you 
> folks think? Have you ever made the comparison before?
>
> Happy May Day,
> Cormac
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l