The Thomas Pynchon Novel for the Edward Snowden Era

But ideas, not plot, have always been Pynchon’s main concern. The central preoccupation of Bleeding Edge
is the nexus of technology and terror—not terrorism itself so much as
our culture’s amorphous fears about the future. A topic statement
arrives early in the novel, spoken by a hacker named Felix Boïngueaux.
He develops both malware and malware-detection software; Maxine can’t
tell where his sympathies lie. “You’re frowning,” says Boïngueaux.
“We’re beyond good and evil here, the technology, it’s neutral, eh?”

Maxine doesn’t reply, and the question lingers. Is
technology neutral? Novels can pull off a trick that nonfiction cannot
replicate: they allow us not only to consider an idea in elaborate
detail, but to inhabit an idea, to follow it through to its most extreme
conclusions. To live it.