Vagabonds of the Void

Beneath the rubbernecking Chums of Chance wheeled streets and alley-ways in a Cartesian grid, sketched in sepia, mile on mile. … From this height it was as if the Chums, who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cattle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor. (p.10)

This aerial view of Chicago is reminiscent of the moment in Lot 49 when, from a Chevy in the hills, the L.A. city grid is seen as a circuit board.

She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she thought of the time she’d opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had. (p.14)

Quite literally world views, each of these descriptions is stunningly apt, technologically appropriate and partakes of the signature paranoic Pynchonian penchant. (Sorry, it’s infectious.) Zeros and ones, cattle gates to logic gates, we shuffle and are sorted.