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. Isn't this a description of science fiction? I emphasize this point because it is so obvious to have been ignored. (pp. 51-2)

All of Pynchon's fiction presents to us a War of the Worlds. The evocation of H. G. Wells' famous science fiction novel is intentional, for it is helpful to think of Pynchon's works as science fiction raised to art by the power of genius. But we should not lose sight of the fact that his fiction is fantastic, and that the basic narrative energy in his novels derives from the clash between this world and what I will abbreviate as The Other Kingdom—between our world of logic and rationality and five senses, and a nightmare world that has begun to penetrate it and threaten it. (p. 52)

Albert Einstein claimed that he had discovered some of the secrets of energy and matter because he had never stopped trying to answer the questions little children ask. I think there is a significant parallel between Einstein and Pynchon, the mathematician who never forgot the first questions and the writer who has never stopped trying to resurrect the magic latent in our oldest fairy tales. (p. 53)

We must recognize that Pynchon does not use fairy tale magic or supernatural event in a merely psychological way, or as a metaphor only. His Other Kingdom is never directly described, but it is potent and malign. (p. 54)

The central figure in Gravity's Rainbow, the intelligence operative Tyrone Slothrop, begins toward the end of the book to "thin, to scatter,"… and at last simply disappears, no longer "any sort of integral creature."… Characters, animals, whole choruses burst into song or limerick; scenes of cartoon surrealism are spliced into more realistic narrative, and Pynchon evidently feels no obligation to maintain a consistent tone, perspective, or degree of verisimilitude. (pp. 54-5)

Pynchon does not enter into any covenant with the reader as to what is "real" and what is "fantastic." His fiction is fantastic in essence, not incidentally or symbolically. He does not hold a mirror up to nature, but steps through a looking glass into a realm governed by magical forces rather than logical ones, and we will misread his fiction if we expect it to be confined to the empirical world.

The spy is isolated in a twilight world of ominous potentialities and his occupational disease is paranoia, but Pynchon's fascination with that profession and that obsession runs much deeper than simple thriller melodrama or the portraiture of fear. A spy is in fact a good choice for a protagonist to carry forward a secular quest, especially one that intimates apocalypse, and if paranoia is without question Pynchon's favorite noun, motive, and atmosphere, the sinister designs which the protagonist finds himself uncovering turn out to be not his own obsessions but the spiderwork of the Other Kingdom. (pp. 55-6)

Spies, fairy tales, and the terrors of childhood are … properties which perfectly suit Pynchon's fiction and can serve as a shorthand to describe its atmosphere. The Other Kingdom conspires against us—just as we always knew it did. (p. 57)

In the nervous quickening of the air just before apocalypse, spies and children will be the first to sense what is coming, and it is in their sensibilities that the recognition will be most sharp and potent. Since all of Pynchon's fiction takes place in the moment just before apocalypse, his use of spies and the terrors of childhood is the essence of his tone and brilliantly appropriate to his most impressive effects…. It is always important to try to understand the significance of what you do not find in a writer's world, and in Pynchon's fiction we find very little that can be discussed without using the terms apocalypse, fairy tale, conspiracy, childhood, and spy. There are no successful marriages or complete families in his novels, no one holds down an ordinary job or advances in an ordinary career, and the bond between parent and child is usually omitted, but often poisoned or monstrous when introduced. (pp. 57-8)

All of Pynchon's favorites are nobodies and victims whose only real connections are with other consenting adults, not with their own families or children. Friendship and compassion are the cardinal virtues in Pynchon's world, and these virtues are in contrast to a backdrop of official "power and indifference,"… to those "vast and terrifying conspiracies," and to military and police brutality. Pynchon loathes organized authority, and he presents civilization's murderous repressions as rooted in Christian guilt over our own sexuality and fear of our own death. Gravity's Rainbow is a great tract in defense of extinct and endangered species…. Like children, Pynchon's favorites are powerless, and an outrage that is much like a child's incredulous disgust with the adult world's repressions, hypocrisy, and brutality surfaces in the consciousness of almost every one of them sooner or later…. This combination of outrage and helplessness is the purest tone in all Pynchon's fiction: the truth is colossal, terrible, imminent and unalterable. (pp. 58-9)

Gravity's Rainbow is saturated with references to Rilke and lines from his poetry, and it seems important in understanding Pynchon's magic world to point out that, of all poems of any worth, Rilke's are the most difficult either to describe or paraphrase, but that we can at least be certain they imply everywhere the overwhelming desire to drive beyond this life, these realities, this contemptible moment. The Duino Elegies or the Sonnets to Orpheus begin several inches off the ground and then immediately fly off toward the same Transforming, Transcending Kingdom of Beyond that Pynchon can't describe, either: Rilke is the consummation of that tendency of German thought that Jean-Paul Richter in the last century encapsulated once and for all with his claim that, if the French ruled the empire of the land and the British that of the sea, the Germans were sovereign in the empire of the air…. Pynchon loves Rilke because of this antirationalism, and if we subtract Pynchon's sense of humor and horseplay and his love of the animated cartoon I think he can be most revealingly placed in the context of what we might call German Expressionism, circa 1910–1930. Here we find the affirmation of instinct, Dionysius, female and antipaternal values, and a corresponding disgust with Wilhelmine Germany, with stern, paunchy Bismarck, with any and every emblem of the tyrant-father. (p. 59)

A line can be drawn from every term enumerated [in German Expressionism] straight into Gravity's Rainbow, and it seems like a promising place to start in assessing Pynchon's relationship to the previous. But what any age chooses to make of its great fantasists constitutes nothing less than its intellectual essence, and one can only say with confidence that people will continue to be fascinated and alarmed by Pynchon for a long time to come. He is at the least a gifted prose stylist who has added magic to an age badly in need of it. (p. 60)