Thomas Pynchon is a master of the discourses of science and of technology, and they are key structural elements in several of his works. V. (1963), for instance, centers on the fight between the animate and the inanimate, closely associated with technology. Rocket science is also essential to the quest and structure of Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), and astronomy to the course of the two heroes of Mason & Dixon (1997). Already in his short story “Entropy” (1960), the eponymous scientific concept serves as an “abstract unifying agent” (SL 11), as Pynchon deprecatingly expressed it upon reissuing the story in Slow Learner (1984). He also mockingly highlighted the fact that, for the outside temperature in that story, he “chose 37 degrees Fahrenheit for an equilibrium point because 37 degrees Celsius is the temperature of the human body. Cute, huh?” (SL 13).