Asimov and Pynchon

[Mark Kohut]

Did l miss where we learned what Asimov wrote about Entropy?


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 Mon, May 4, 2026 at 8:50 AM Joseph Tracy via Pynchon-l <
pynchon-l at waste.org> wrote:

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> -------- 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
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>