Timothy Leary:

The Bible of the 21st Century, written in 1973 by Thomas Pynchon, is called GRAVITY´S RAINBOW.

It takes place in 1945, when the fall of the German Empire leaves Europe a lawless zone in which the major powers struggle for control of the future.

The spoils of this high-tech war are not land or raw materials but scientists and scientific information.

Everyone knows that the next war will be won not by the bravest, not by the strongest, but by the smartest.

The Bad Guys, the intelligence-espionage agencies of the superpowers, ruthlessly scour the continent for atomic secrets, rocket equipment, chemical patents, and, above all, pyschological methods for brainwashing, mind reading, pyschodiagnosis, and behavior modifications.

At the same time there emerges the Counterforce, a loosely related network of Good Guys, rowdy agents, independant thinkers, high-tech mystics who deal themselves into the action, each one in pursuit of their own private visions.

In the book, a band of black African troops just demobilized from the army seek to control their own V-2 rocket.

Roger Mexico, a statistical psychologist, harasses the Fat Men in the control towers to win back his girlfriend.

Major Tchitcherine, a Soviet intelligence agent and hashish connoisseur, conducts a mystical search for his African brother.

Tyrone Slothrop, unwilling subject of a bizarre CIA psychological experiment, flees across the zones, chased by Ollie Norths and protected by an underground netword of Cyberpunks.

Best of all, GRAVITY´S RAINBOW is an authoritative text on how to understand and neutralize the Cybervillians, the secret police of all nations.

With brilliant parody and farcical satire, Pynchon exposes the weirdo psychology, the kinky sociology, the ruthless inhumanism of all the national espionage combines.

Thomas Pynchon brilliantly demonstrates . . . the motivating force behind the seemingly irrational convulsions of the 20th century. . . . A book which serves well as an initiatory primer for Outer Space Migration. . . . (Dr. Timothy Leary)