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In late October 1984, Thomas Pynchon published a brief piece in the New York Times Book Review entitled "Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?" in which he discusses (among other things) his misgivings about the influence of the military-industrial complex on the society and government of the United States. This essay marked Pynchon's first public commentary on the state of the world since the publication of Gravity's Rainbow, his controversial magnum opus, in 1973. His essay appeared as a number of historians and journalists were declaring the arrival of "the second Cold War", a position premised on the notion that détente was a fundamental departure from the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War. Pynchon disputes this view, arguing that the social, economic, and government forces that created the Cold War in the first place had been consistently functioning ever since.
The ostensible occasion for Pynchon's essay was the twenty-fifth anniversary of C.P. Snow's lecture "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution". For Pynchon, this address was "notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into 'literary' and 'scientific' factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other". Although Pynchon claims that the ubiquity of technology and information had, for better or worse, rendered this distinction largely meaningless by 1984, he felt compelled to respond to Snow's "immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion" that "literary intellectuals" were both resistant to and incapable of understanding the Industrial Revolution and were "natural Luddites". Pynchon wryly recites the history of the Luddite movement and argues that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is a quintessential^ Luddite novel because it attempts, "through literary means which are nocturnal and deal in disguise, to deny the machine".1
While Pynchon never directly refers to his own work in answering the rhetorical question that appears in the essay's title, he discusses a series of themes that recur in his three previous novels. He also replies to his critics in defending the right to disapprove of and even to subvert the existing social system. He argues that those who stand to the most from the status quo are the same as those who attempt to use their attendant control over language to marginalize those "literary intellectuals" who oppose it: "the idea...