Gravity's Rainbow

Author: Thomas Pynchon

When it was first published, Gravity's Rainbow was shortlisted for the Nebula Award, losing out to Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama. In their introduction to The Secret History of Science Fiction, John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly argue that, if Gravity's Rainbow had won, the entire subsequent history of science fiction would have been different. That is probably too big a claim, most core genre sf would have continued as if nothing had happened, and a few proto-puppies might have muttered about the wrong sorts taking their awards. But maybe, just maybe, the sort of open, experimental writing we've seen in some of the best recent sf might have come along a decade or so sooner. Not that Gravity's Rainbow is an altogether coherent novel; it's by Pynchon so there's always new stuff coming at you from left field. But it is a big, sprawling, invigorating novel full of invention, in which the sexual exploits of one character predict where German rockets are going to land in wartime London, while the search is on for the mysterious black device due to be loaded onto rocket number 00000. If science fiction is all about novelty and invention and scenes that make you see the whole world differently, then you don't get much more science fictional than Gravity's Rainbow. It may not have been the book that changed science fiction, but it should have been.