into each other in order to exchange information and take care of business which in the fiction of the 20th and 21st century is transacted via telephone or e-mail.11 No matter where in the world the many characters run into old friends or enemies, they see signs of the spread of modernity. Technology has always played a crucial part in Pynchon’ novels and Against the Day is no exception. The novel devotes a great deal of space to describing the establishment of the modern networks of transportation and communication that are prerequisites for globalization as we know it. When Kit encounters Fleetwood Vibe in Tunguska, he has just come across the first traces of a new railroad that will eventually cleave its way through the vast taiga ofSiberia and connect the Trans-Siberian Railroad with the barren Chinese Taklamakan desert (789). Elsewhere in the novel we learn that the American continent is similarly ensnared in a rapidly growing railroad web (177), and when Kit embarks on his Asian journey from a Belgian train station, he realizes that it is a matter of time before the whole world is spun into a network of steel: At the Ostende-Ville Station, Kit had a moment […] in which he glimpsed how Ostend really might not be simply another pleasure-resort for people with too much money, but the western anchor of a continental system that happened to include the Orient Express, the Trans-Siberian, the Berlin-to-Baghdad, and so on in steel proliferation across the World-Island. (567) One of the novel’s characters,