Gravity’s Rainbow Under Today’s Hypersonic Skies

In our era of awe-inspiring hypersonic weaponry, we turn to Thomas Pynchon, who warns in Gravity’s Rainbow that the Rocket is never mere hardware; it is a nihilistic creed whose liturgy is speed.

Gravity’s Rainbow (Deluxe Edition) Thomas Pynchon Penguin Classics 31 October 2006

On 19 December 2024, inside Moscow’s cavernous Gostiny Dvor hall in a moment that oddly mirrors Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Vladimir Putin paused mid-answer at his annual press conference, tilted toward the cameras and issued a dare: “We’re ready for an experiment – let the West choose a target, surround it with its best defenses, and we’ll strike it with Oreshnik to see who is faster.”

Behind him, aides displayed the experimental missile’s hazel-nut insignia while giant screens replayed its debut hypersonic flight that obliterated Ukraine’s Pivdenmash factory in Dnipro four weeks earlier. The Russian leader talked as if he were unboxing a new smartphone, but the pitch was lethal: speed itself, he implied, is now Russia’s supreme credential.

The video footage from the November attack is uncanny: for one heartbeat, the frames are silent; then they white out, as flaming debris geysers skyward. When the missile hit the complex, it triggered explosions that lasted three hours. The weapon arrived at Mach 11 after a 700-kilometre, 15-minute arc from Astrakhan. It can maneuver above the Earth’s atmosphere, before descending on its victim with highly precise targeting and underground penetration capabilities.

Within 24 hours of that first shot, Putin appeared on state television to hail the launch as a combat test and promised additional firings should NATO continue to arm Kyiv. The missile’s trajectory from test range to press conference prop embodied a technocratic cult of velocity. Whoever commands the fastest arc commands the narrative. Only an attack aimed at the myth of speed itself can break that spiral.

Hypersonic missiles are the subject of intense R&D by all major military powers. Travelling at speeds higher than Mach 5, they are still able to maneuver over long ranges. Despite Western speculation that Oreshnik’s novelty was overstated for propaganda purposes, Russia’s goal of intimidation was arguably achieved. Oreshnik is both exceedingly destructive, due to the sheer energy it unleashes upon impact, and near-impossible to intercept.

Gravity’s Rainbow Satirizes Our Liturgy of Speed

In that strike, commentators saw a revival of Cold War-era nuclear blackmail, but a rocket that outruns its own thunder could have stepped straight out of Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Pynchon – one of the most prominent American postmodernist authors – warned us that the Rocket is never mere hardware; it is a creed whose liturgy is speed.

Now, as his forthcoming novel, Shadow Ticket, rekindles global fascination with his apocalyptic imagination, the sequel is being written in real-world steel and plasma. Pynchon knew that the real payload of speed is moral compression. The very theology of velocity that he anatomized in Gravity’s Rainbow rules today’s hypersonic arms race.

To truly understand our predicament, we have to read missile tests as sermons and budget lines as liturgy. That’s why Pynchon placed his story into the wreckage of post-WWII Europe. Part parody, part apocalypse, and part paranoid scripture, Gravity’s Rainbow is one of the last great novels that tries not only to represent the modern world but to reveal it: its hidden mechanisms, its use of death as an organizing principle.

The story begins with a surreal premise. In the last months of World War II, every sexual encounter of an American officer named Tyrone Slothrop seems to precede a V-2 rocket strike in London by a few days. What starts as slapstick, however, quickly mutates into something closer to metaphysics.

Slothrop becomes a hunted figure across the lawless, borderless, military-occupied terrain of Central Europe – the “Zone” – seeking the mysterious Rocket 00000. Its payload might consist of “Imipolex G”, an experimental plastic that once touched his own infant body during sinister psychological experiments.

As Slothrop drifts through this apocalyptic theatre of intelligence agents, mystics, ex-Nazis, fetishists, anarchists, and failed revolutionaries, the novel reveals its true subject: not the war itself, but the sprawling web of labs, boardrooms, and barracks, erotic politics, mysticism, and myth that persist underneath the so-called “rational” order of the West.

Beneath its colorful cast, Gravity’s Rainbow is a dark revelation about the Enlightenment’s ultimate offspring: a culture of death, masked by a veneer of progress. The Rocket is a symbol of modernity’s schizophrenic promise: to take us to the stars, or reduce the world to ashes. It has become the governing myth of contemporary precision warfare; hypersonics reveal how that myth still disciplines politics, budgets, and imagination.

Gravity’s Rainbow Illuminates the Enlightenment Machine

Pynchon emerged as both heir and traitor to the Western canon. A descendent of the Beat counterculture and the New Left, his voice carried the political despair of the early 1970s, when the utopias of the ‘60s were being snuffed out by reactionary realpolitik.

Yet his critique is not nostalgia. He does not long for an earlier humanism. Instead, Gravity’s Rainbow confronts modernity as a total system – scientific, bureaucratic, militaristic, erotic, and mystical – one that has transcended the battlefield and entered the very circuits of thought, desire, and culture.

The novel’s style itself is insurrectionary. Narrative threads fragment and dissolve, and perspectives shift without warning. Digressions into pop culture and comic book characters, Nazi occultism and tarot mysticism, corporate conspiracy and sexual perversion shatter all illusions of stability. Characters appear and vanish. This formal entropy – the systemic tendency towards disorder – mirrors the book’s central statement: that our very need for coherence – rational, historical, narrative – is a function of power, not truth.

Thus, Gravity’s Rainbow doesn’t merely describe fragmentation; it enacts it. It is not about paranoia; it makes the reader paranoid. Its language, its erratic structure, and its refusal to resolve all mirror the impossibility of locating a “center” in a decentered world.

This is where Pynchon goes further than modernist predecessors like James Joyce or Samuel Beckett. He doesn’t just break narrative conventions; he proposes a world in which conventions themselves are symptoms of repression. The novel’s demand is not aesthetic but existential: to endure confusion, to resist synthesis, to inhabit the chaos rather than transcend it.

At the center of this chaos lies the Rocket. Not merely as a weapon, but as an esoteric object of devotion. Various characters worship it, study it, and hallucinate about it. It becomes a text, a god, a symbol of technocratic dominance. The Rocket is the apex of utilitarian Western Reason: phallic, precise, modern, and murderous. It is not just a weapon of war; it is the axis of desire and the emblem of apocalypse.

The paranoid structure of Gravity’s Rainbow – everything is connected to everything else – is not a stylistic excess. It is the worldview of a culture that has replaced myth with statistics, gods with systems, narrative with logistics. In that vacuum, the Rocket’s pursuit by Pynchon’s characters is not just as a military object but as a metaphysical question: it prefigures the endpoint of a society whose greatest achievement is the precise delivery of death.

Pynchon Skewers Science as New Theology

Pynchon is not anti-science, but he is deeply suspicious of its mythos. Characters like Roger Mexico and Pointsman try to apply deterministic models to human behavior, treating people as chemical reactions or Pavlovian dogs, but their experiments fail. Reality escapes quantification, and entropy reigns supreme.

Yet, the scientific worldview continues to dominate, not because it works, but because it legitimizes power. Rationality is not the enemy of mysticism; it is its mutation. Pynchon’s scientists are not cold realists but tortured priests of a new religion, struggling to decipher the universe through differential equations, corporate contracts, and the choreography of rockets in flight.

In this sense, science has not replaced religion; it has become it. “But the Rocket has to be many things”, according to Pynchon. “It must survive heresies shining, unconfoundable… and heretics there will be: Gnostics who have been taken in a rush of wind and fire to chambers of the Rocket-throne… Kabbalists who study the Rocket as Torah […] Manicheans who see two Rockets, good and evil.”

This view is even timelier in the 21st century. Pynchon’s world of endless “peace-time war”, of corporate sovereignty, of technologically sanctified destruction, is not a structure of the 1940s; it is the infrastructure of the present. His paranoid characters searching for meaning in the traces of power reflect our own fragmented attempts to make sense of surveillance capitalism, ecological collapse, algorithmic governance, and post-truth politics.

Pynchon Paranoia in Our Endless “Hidden“ War

Oreshnik’s debut last November was therefore more than a battlefield one-off: it was a public sacrament in a transnational theology of hypersonic deterrence. Enter Northrop Grumman’s “Glide Phase Interceptor”, an American answer designed to meet the missile half-arc and vaporize it in the upper atmosphere. Meanwhile, the U.S. Army has scheduled its own hypersonic weapon test for December 2025.

To Pynchon, this choreography would look painfully familiar. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the V-2 is not a German rocket or an Allied target; it is a self-expanding system that drafts every ideology into its supply chain, operating at a global scale.

Likewise today, Oreshnik and its designated nemeses enroll rival governments and private contractors in the same supranational loop, where procurement cycles – not principles – decide the timetable of ignition and impact. A self-perpetuating global machine of war, profits, and shareholders, operating beyond borders and breathing behind the news headlines.

Hypersonics, like Pynchon’s V-2, gleam because they seem to abolish time. Yet the physics is far less cinematic. Take, for example, Boost-Glide Vehicles (BGV), a common form of hypersonic weapons, which glide within the atmosphere for most of their path. The truth is that a traditional ballistic warhead coasting through near-vacuum actually reaches intercontinental targets faster than a BGV clawing its way through thick air.

In fact, drag, heating, and the brute cost of course changes siphon away the very speed that headlines celebrate. Every extra Mach number multiplies skin temperature, demanding exotic alloys and niobium coatings that melt national budgets long before they melt themselves. Engineers speak of the “cube law”: push velocity a little, pay exponentially.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, this paradox already lurks inside the Rocket’s chrome: the harder modernity accelerates, the more entropy it breeds. Oreshnik and its Western pursuers re-enact that lesson at Mach 11, trading marginal gains in flight path for huge surges of logistical complexity.

Precision itself becomes a ritual – expensive, fragile, compulsory – rather than a guarantee of mastery. The result is a weapon class whose practical advantage remains contested but whose symbolic power is overwhelming. Hypersonics are theatre in the “Zone”: a spectacle of invincibility that must remain half-imagined to stay effective.

Because the performance edge is ambiguous, the real contest migrates to myth. When China lobbed a fractional orbital glider around the planet in 2021, US generals called it a “Sputnik moment”. The phrase mattered more than the kilotons; it re-inscribed the Cold War script in which technological awe stands in for moral authority.

Pynchon would recognize the choreography: nations baptizing themselves in ever larger exhaust plumes, convinced that deterrence equals transcendence. Inside the novel, competing cabals fight to possess Rocket 00000 not because it will decisively alter the war – it is already too late for that – but because whoever narrates the Rocket narrates the future.

So too with Oreshnik, Zircon, Dark Eagle: each test launch of these weapons stages a claim about whose cosmology will govern the 2030s. The security dilemma tightens: every debut invites an “answer” missile, every interceptor demands a faster glider, every funding line engraves the theology more deeply into national pride. The arms merchants thrive on the feedback loop, just as Pynchon’s shell companies and cartels thrived on perpetual reconstruction.

After all, despite its setting, Gravity’s Rainbow is not a historical novel about World War II. Instead, it suggests that the War never ends. The violence becomes more subtle, more institutional, more economic, but no less deadly.

“The Germans-and-Japs story,” Pynchon writes, “was only one, rather surrealistic version of the real War. The real War is always there. The dying tapers off now and then, but the War is still killing lots and lots of people. Only right now it is killing them in more subtle ways. […] But the right people are dying, just as they do when armies fight.”

The Nazi rocket program, the Allied intelligence apparatus, the rise of global corporations – they all become part of the same sprawling apparatus. Gravity’s Rainbow proposes no master conspiracy, but rather that conspiracy itself has become the existential condition of modern power: decentralized, opaque, ubiquitous. There are no villains – only systems.

The figure of the “Zone”, where national borders are blurred and identities dissolve, is not just a backdrop. It is a metaphor for our era: a liminal space where the old gods are dead, but the new ones are still being built in secret labs, corporate boardrooms, and subterranean launch sites.

Toward the Rainbow Abyss at Hypersonic Speed

In its final pages, the story disintegrates along with its hero. Slothrop dissolves into a scattered presence, his identity consumed by the system he tried to trace. The Rocketman, the Modern Man, the Tarot’s Fool, the seeker of meaning, the offspring of Science, the uprooted antihero with a stolen identity and incomprehensible goals, has already shattered, and the unexpected ending is written through the “cruciform” sacrifice of innocence.

Whoever among the readers has endured up to that point – with a rocket pointing at them on the final page – is rewarded with the true image of the West: a vision straight out of Hell. Much like the book itself.

Gravity’s Rainbow offers no solution. Its genius is not in giving us answers, but in dragging us deeper into the questions we are taught to ignore: What is modernity’s real payload? Is control the opposite of chaos, or is it the engine? Can any human truth survive inside systems designed to process life into information?

We do not have to resort to our imagination for the answers. An Israeli AI tool nicknamed “Lavender” reportedly flagged thousands of Gazan phone numbers for instantaneous strike approval. Ukraine’s GIS Arta software feeds firing coordinates into artillery units that loiter until algorithms pick the ripest target. Meanwhile, US digital tech giants are transforming into defense contractors, and Europe shifts to a high-tech rearmament sprint after extensive industry lobbying.

Every step of those kill chains – the digital sequences that identify, target, and authorize military strikes – embodies the same Pynchonian conversion of flesh into telemetry, life into metadata for algorithms. This isn’t an abstract dilemma: high-tech arms races are policy choices, not destiny, and every hypersonic launch chips away at our shared humanity.

Military planners insist that hypersonics will restore deterrence by punching through layered defenses. Yet each interceptor that downs a missile costs roughly the same as the latter; an arms race equilibrium emerges in which expense dictates the tempo.

This is pure Pynchon: capital and lethality chasing one another in a spiral where “the right people are dying” and the right contractors are billing. Even the scientific discourse is tinged with devotion. Materials scientists at conferences speak of carbon-carbon composites the way Pynchon’s technocratic mystics spoke of Imipolex G – miracle substances that promise immunity from entropy.

In practice, test vehicles burn up, guidance packages jitter, and programs slip rightward on Gantt charts. The gap between aspiration and reality is papered over with CGI launch videos; digital stained-glass windows for the congregation. The public sees an unstoppable arc; the engineer sees heating rates, telemetry dropouts, truncated ranges. Between those perceptions wedges a lucrative ambiguity.

The Rainbow is thus less a spectrum than a fogbank, in which politicians, investors, and citizens project whatever hue of security they crave. That hallucinatory quality, Pynchon warns in Gravity’s Rainbow, is exactly what allows technological systems to metastasize beyond democratic oversight.

The pressing challenge now becomes one of staging a truly public debate on what kind of society technology should serve. What limits should the people impose on governments and private contractors, regarding the use of cutting-edge technology for military purposes?

How Gravity’s Rainbow Could Help Break Our Hypersonic Creed

If the Rocket is theology, disarmament must be iconoclasm; an assault not on hardware alone but on the stories that sanctify it. Four interlocking moves, each one grounded in precedent, can begin dismantling today’s creed of velocity.

The first step can be a cost-truth audit: refuse the conflation of velocity with virtue. Studies comparing hypersonics to depressed trajectory ballistic missiles already suggest parity at a lower cost; making those analyses public would puncture the illusion of inevitability. In fact, the U.S. Navy expects every hypersonic Conventional Prompt Strike round to cost $56.5 million, more than ten times a Tomahawk.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) could perform similar, independent audits on cost per delivered joule, maneuverability envelope, and interception probability. Publicizing such a study would puncture the “unstoppable” mystique of hypersonic weapons.

Moreover, transparency triggers can be legislated: any state test of a BGV should auto-notify rivals under a pre-filed telemetry schema, forcing narrative into data before myth takes root. The New START nuclear arms reduction treaty already forces Russia and the United States to swap test telemetry in case of ICBM launches.

Although Russia suspended its participation in the treaty, citing security concerns, public pressure could enforce not only its bilateral re-activation, but also a hypersonic addendum: this could extend the notification process to cases where any BGV crosses an altitude of 50 km. Because every party receives the same machine-readable data, the launch loses its theatrical aura of surprise.

A pertinent measure would be to revive arms control language and adapt it to the hypersonic age. Traditional nuclear arms control treaties count warheads; hypersonics exploit that loophole by trading mass for speed.

To bypass this, the logic of carbon-budget environmental caps can be borrowed by setting a ceiling on aggregate energy flux – total kinetic energy moved in a unit of time – for any strategic missile class. Contractors would have to choose between a few ultra-fast prototypes or many slower ones, re-introducing opportunity cost and deliberately slowing the race, thus targeting the theology of precision itself.

Finally, cultural labor: teach Thomas Pynchon’s works, or that of someone like him, in war colleges and engineering programs. Not as literary garnish but as systems analysis, a reminder that every line of code or alloy spec participates in a moral architecture. US war college reading lists already assign fiction to cultivate strategic imagination. Adding Gravity’s Rainbow would confront future program managers with the moral architecture of velocity.

None of these moves will dissolve the rocket-shaped hole in modernity overnight. They need organized public pressure. A grassroots coalition on the scale of the 1970s-’80s anti-nuclear war movement will be essential to bend decision-makers. If such pressure materializes, these measures might reopen the political space that hypersonic hype has sealed.

In Gravity’s Rainbow, the “Zone” flickers with alternate possibilities before consolidating into the Cold War borders. We inhabit a similar hinge. Refusing the false sublime of speed might be the only way to keep that hinge from snapping shut. As engines scream overhead and decide who lives or dies, politics might still interrupt the countdown to annihilation. Or the Rocket will remain the only god we obey.