| Summary: | In the late 50’s the emergent talent of Thomas Pynchon induced the future author to take up the challenge of writing his early tales in which some scientific ideas took the form of short tales filled with paranoid and manic characters. The most known of these tales was “Entropy”, first published in 1960. Here a young man named Callisto firmly believes that the stagnation of the temperature at 37° F is the certain omen of an imminent paralysis of human relationships because of the increase of the entropy. Though the party around him goes on and on in a striking indifference to his fear, contradicting this feeling, his paranoia doesn’t decrease and, on the contrary, grows stronger because of the common indifference. Pynchon’s subsequent characters will not show this limit, leaving an atmosphere of conspiracy and mistrust to the world in which they move but not embodying it. At the present time we know that the measurement of entropy does not fix at all the future of the universe, because in the last decades the dark matter and the dark energy have been discovered. Anyway, this short tale written by Pynchon sixty years ago can be considered the typical evidence of an age when science and fiction used to have a productive dialog that today is sadly missing.
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