SOURCE: "Gravity's Rainbow: Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Mythology," in Intersections: Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by George E. Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, Southern Illinois University Press, 1987, pp. 190-200.

In the following essay, Hume explores the intersection of science fiction, fantasy, and mythology in Gravity's Rainbow.

Gravity's Rainbow has been hailed by John Brunner as an "incontestably science-fictional retrospective parallel world," (that is, an alternate wartime London); also, by Geoffrey Cocks as the Miltonic epic of science fiction that "has taken science/speculative fiction beyond the genre's limits into metaphysics, metapsychology, and cosmology." It has also been identified as gothic, as encyclopedic, and as various kinds of satire or anatomy. I am particularly sympathetic to the desire of some critics to claim Gravity's Rainbow for science fiction, because so little mainstream fiction engages with science in any significant way, and because the identification would perhaps attract more attention...