whole ethnic groups rootless and threw them to all points of the compass. The main character, the American lieutenant Tyrone Slothrop, wanders through a devastated Germany after the end of the war, and everywhere he encounters the starved participants in the greatest migration of world history: The Nationalities are on the move. It is a great frontierless streaming out here. Volksdeutsch from across the Oder, moved out by the Poles and headed for the camp at Rostock, Poles fleeing the Lublin regime, others going back home, the eyes of both parties, when they do meet, hooded behind cheekbones, eyes much older than what’s forced them into moving, Estonians, Letts, and Lithuanians trekking north again, all their wintry wool in dark bundles, shoes in tatters, songs too hard tois in many ways a product of the American counterculture of the 1960s and early 1970s, where the British scientist James Lovelock was an important figure. Inspired by the discipline of cybernetics, Lovelock introduced his influential Gaia Hypothesis around 1970, where he described Earth as a self-regulating organism whose feedback processes maintain a fragile balance between its various living elements. As Tom LeClair has shown in The Art of Excess, there are many similarities between James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis and Gravity’s Rainbow, where Earth is repeatedly described as a living creature. The character Lyle Bland finds it “hard to get over the wonder of finding that Earth is a living critter, after all these years of thinking about a big dumb rock to find a body and psyche”