Word: slothrop
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Dates: during 1973-1973
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WHAT THERE IS of a main plot line is this: Tyrone Slothrop, Harvard, U.S. Army, is stationed in Britain in the late stages of World War II, working for Allied Intelligence. Slothrop, it turns out, is quite the ladies' man and has a map of London on his wall to keep good track of his romantic conquests. It further turns out that Slothrop's collection of females falls into precisely the same geographical distribution as the German bombs dropping on the city. Regular as clockwork, every sector inhabited by a Slothropian bedmate is shortly thereafter the recipient of a German...
This phenomenon much excites the attention of one Ned Pointsman, a half-mad Pavlovian working at PISCES (Psychological Intelligence Schemes for Expediting Surrender). Pointsman persuades the higher-ups to investigate the intricacies of Slothrop's sexuality, and the scene then shifts to testing grounds in southern France. Slothrop, after a time, manages to escape, and the remainder of the novel follows his odyssey from France through Switzerland into a by-now post-war Germany...
Revelations ensue. Slothrop stumbles on a still-surviving elite Nazi rocket corps made up of black Hereros from South Africa who have set out to find and fire the last great German rocket prototype, the Schwarzgerat 00000. He then uncovers evidence of a worldwide conspiracy between General Electric, the Krupps, Shell Oil, I.G. Farben, FDR, the Russians and countless others, to fabricate World War II as an excuse to provide funding for their several special interests. Last and worst, Slothrop learns that his own father, Borderick Slothrop, long ago signed over his son's life to that Conspiracy, so Tyrone...
...history to find what, if anything, Vera, Valletta, Vheissu and Vogelsang have in common. And Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, drives up and down the Californian coast exploring the remains of an underground postal system that has survived silently for centuries. But Stencil, Maas and Slothrop can never confirm their conspiracies, and what is more, they cannot tell which is worse--a conspiracy or the possibility that there is no force at all behind the pattern, that it is an accident, a random ordering...