Gravity's Rainbow has taken science/speculative fiction beyond the genre's limits into metaphysics, metapsychology, and cosmology. Pynchon has accomplished this by questing at the innermost nature of homo sapiens and in so doing has called into serious question some of the basic and sanguine assumptions upon which contemporary notions of science fiction are founded.

First of all, Pynchon, in the Freudian tradition, is concerned with the dualism that is reflected in the designation of the species homo sapiens. For Pynchon, to quote the essence of Ernest Becker's commentary on "the psychoanalyst Kierkegaard": "The creatureliness is the terror." The consequence of man's condition—the dualism of self and body—is a fear and denial of death. (p. 368)

Additionally, Pynchon adopts Norman O. Brown's conception of history as neurosis. Brown notes that the maturation process of the human animal is unique in its prolongation of infancy and its postponement of puberty. The human child enjoys an existence initially shielded from reality by the parents; but this paradise comes at a price—the repression of timeless pleasure in the body as the parents invoke reality and enforce it with the threat of the loss of love which the dependent child needs and desires….

Finally, Pynchon sees science and technology as the most significant symptoms of the human neurosis, rather than the means to apotheosis that remains at the heart of science fiction as, for example, expressed by Ben Bova…. (p. 369)

In Gravity's Rainbow, technology in its most aggressive form, its military guise, actually becomes the central character in the form of the A4/V-2 rocket…. The whole thrust of the scientific revolution which has finally permitted man's escape from gravity is the latest entry in the "record to impose the human will upon the movements of time." War, then, is more than a threat to species extinction in the nuclear age: it is an expression of humanity's Promethean/Faustian drive….

With devastating irony, Pynchon has rendered the War an insane bureaucracy that obliterates individual heroics and male prowess (the nuclear phallus is "dangling") in a mass of markets and matériel…. Man is lost in confusion and impotence, his vaunted technology, his military expertise, his Faustian history-making compulsion swept downward not in a cybernetic dystopia but in the dark, random, relentless process of entropy. Pynchon's War is chaos…. (pp. 371-72)

The betrayal of the Cycle by the System in the shape of "its own tiny desperate fraction" is expressive of Pynchon's vision of the absurdity of human superiority, the ugly lie of cause and effect and its duplicitous religious and ethical analogue. Preterition. The concept of the Elect and the Preterit, or those passed over, is "evoked as an early mission of the paranoia conditioning us to look for signs of Election and rendering the rest of mankind and its evidences invisible, merely so much waste." The wish for salvation on the one hand is futile; the ugly myth of Election, on the other hand, is the terrified response of humanity to the fact of its mortality. (p. 373)

A condemnation of the Elect in the name of the Preterite employs an important critique of science fiction's tradition of elitism. An aristocracy of intelligence and scientific leadership has always been a pervasive characteristic of the genre…. The issue here is not one of knowledge versus stupidity, but the motivations for the uses of human intelligence. Indeed, the nature of the genre's creative process, that of extrapolation, may be described as a kind of manipulation, a concern more with the arrangement of pieces on a chess board or the solution to a puzzle than with the insight into human paradox that is at the core of Gravity's Rainbow….

The style of Gravity's Rainbow itself contributes to the distinction between it and traditional science-fiction novels. In place of the finely machined tensile surfaces of Clarke's prose, the physical fulsomeness of Theodore Sturgeon's stories, and the punning pyrotechnics of Philip José Farmer, Pynchon offers a welter of sounds and voices that are extracted from experience (non-literary genres from science, pop culture, and film to comic books, pulp magazines, and the litter of our materially profligate civilization), not honed in quiet extrapolation. (p. 374)

[It] is the valence of the human dualism itself which Pynchon weighs that makes Gravity's Rainbow a revolutionary masterpiece of speculative fiction. It is, after all, not science, that threatens us with dehumanization, but arrogance, dogma, and ignorance. Science fiction incorporates an indispensable appreciation for change: that is its strength. But this open-mindedness and search for knowledge must expand along the avenues established by Pynchon's explorations into our existence as curious and conflicted creatures…. The issue of freedom, human dignity, and responsibility (i.e., what we are and how we should behave) is not just one of extrapolations upon the individual versus the communal mode, but an ontogenetic and phylogenetic appreciation of the paradoxical nature of our being that will remain with us to the edges of our universe. The science and the curiosity that will take us there are not simply the products of reason—they are the symptoms of a dilemma. (p. 375)