GRAVITY'S RAINBOW by Pynchon, Thomas - 1973

New York: The Viking Press, 1973. Octavo, cloth. First edition. The author's third novel. Only 4000 copies of this hardcover issue of the first printing were published. An exceptionally influential novel, winner of the William Dean Howells Medal (for the best work of fiction to appear in the U.S. over a five-year period), the National Book Award, and a 1973 Nebula Award nominee. "A sprawling slipstream novel about a World War II psychological warfare unit full of weird characters, one of whom seems to be determining the pattern of V-2 rocket attacks by his sexual activities but refuses to submit to study and possible control. Extraordinarily elaborate black comedy." - Anatomy of Wonder (2004) II-885. "U.S. writer, all of whose works are fabulations which resemble SF under some interpretations, though the paranoia-wracked worlds his protagonists inhabit defeat any secure reading of the malign figurations of reality ... Enormous and complex, GRAVITY'S RAINBOW offers no repose for a secure reading, but the search for its main protagonist (whose sexual climaxes predict and attract rockets from the V-2s on) fabulously posits an sf world ... Pynchon's general concerns with entropy, paranoia and communication have had a fruitful effect on some sf writers." - Clute and Nicholls (eds), The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993), p. 981. A Burgess 99 title. Barron (ed), Fantasy Literature 4A-213. Survey of Science Fiction Literature II, pp. 915-20. A fine copy in fine dust jacket with touch of wear at head and tail of spine panel at folds and corner tips, minute nick at top edge of front panel, and small closed tear at top edge of front flap. Overall, an excellent copy. (#69427)