PERSON

Thomas Pynchon

The reclusive American novelist who spent six decades building fiction out of a single unbearable question—whether the order we perceive in the world is actually there—and who turns out to have been writing, all along, about the algorithmic age: its opaque coordinating systems, its wars between signal and noise, and its optimization processes that run toward their targets with no one at the controls.

Thomas Pynchon is the wrong writer to consult about artificial intelligence, and that is precisely why he is the right one. He has no theory of machines, no philosophy of mind, no recorded opinion about computation. What he has instead is a body of fiction organized around a single unbearable question—whether the order we perceive in the world is actually there—and that question, held open across six decades of novels beginning with V. in 1963 and continuing through Bleeding Edge in 2013, turns out to be the central question of the algorithmic age. His protagonists cannot tell whether the systems acting on their lives are conspiracies or coincidences, whether the pattern they have found is a message or only static, whether they are being administered or merely imagining the administration. This predicament

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