Many who have written on Pynchon seem much too anxious to present him as a humanistic novelist with redeeming social concerns, although they allow that he sometimes stoops to horseplay, despairing parody, or a few edifying chills in order to share his vision with us. But it seems to me more revealing to view Pynchon as a vastly capable writer of science fiction … than it is to insist that he is a humanistic novelist, or a satirist bent on mending the world. The impulses that created Gravity's Rainbow seem to me to have been largely gothic, and the novel makes extensive use of the only gothic locale that retains any mystery and terror for us in a thoroughly secular, disenchanted age: the laboratory…. Pynchon is creating a magic world more interesting than ours, and he frequently goes to science and technology for his vocabulary, metaphysics, costumes, and props...