ORP: TP: The Crying of Lot 49

Thomas Pynchon uses the stream-of-consciousness technique in all of his writings that I have read thus far. But I have to say, he has a distinctive American voice and I enjoy in this current novel, the playfulness of light paranoia, literary (not as severely intense as James Joyce, of course) and scientific allusions.

This current novel that I am reading (as of this post I am only about a third of the way through it) has a flowing naive party spirit characteristic of the late fifty's/early sixties (20th century) before the price had to be paid (as Philip K. Dick alludes to in his novel, "A Scanner Darkly"). In the case of this novel, the MacGuffin is the conspiracy. See the various blogs and wiki's on the novel. The learning point for me is that I think many Americans, subconsciously, expect certain aspects of life and reality to be influenced/directed/affected by some conspiracy and so this should perhaps be an element one could bring into a novel (as another of the thousand points of light, I mean factors to enhance interest, er...) to enhance the suspension of disbelief necessary for a good story. Of course one would have to have the right balance to avoid obsession but still provoke believability.

Personal note: if I had finished my education earlier in life and had been an engineer, I could 100% relate to the passage from this novel that I am going to quote. As it is I am enough of a technical geek to still almost completely relate to the following:

"Sure this Koteks is part of some underground," he told her a few days later, "an underground of the unbalanced, possibly, but then how can you blame them for being maybe a little bitter? Look what's happening to them. In school they got brainwashed, like all of us, into believing the Myth of the American Inventor--Morse and his telegraph, Bell and his telephone, Edison and his light bulb, Tom Swift and his this or that. Only one man per invention. Then when they grew up they found they had to sign over all their rights to a monster like Yoyodyne; got stuck on some 'project' or 'task force' or 'team' and started being ground into anonymity. Nobody wanted them to invent--only perform their little role in a design ritual, already set down for them in some procedures handbook. What's it like, Oedipa, being all alone in a nightmare like that? Of course they stick together, they keep in touch. They can always tell when they come on another of their kind. Maybe it only happens once every five years, but still, immediately, they know."

In a sense, the modern 'military-industrial-complex has replaced the individual inventor with the harvest of group-mind. Unfortunately, in reality, many engineers working for companies like Boeing, et al, experience this.
Of course I can hear the arguments--just form your own company--but then you don't have time to invent either, because you are doing management, supervision, accounting, collections, advertising, marketing, etc. ad nauseum--but not engineering.
And one can go on into the whole realm of social philosophy viz-a-viz anti-technology vs. progressive aesthetic of design, etc.; I recommend the following book: The Existential Pleasures of Engineering (ISBN-13 978-0312141042).

But just in the passage quoted, you can see that Thomas Pynchon, a technical worker himself in between writing, has some sympathy for all of us who have been "borg-ed".