The effect that science has had in shaping literature has been notably underestimated in the light of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other esoteric followings. For instance, Thomas Pynchon's first three novels (V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity's Rainbow) are like scientific manuals in everything from organic chemistry to rocket science (though they do become estoteric themselves when Pynchon begins interweaving Kabbalistic mysticism with other sciences). Italo Calvino uses scientific processes as a way of developing plots (take, for instance, the first story from t zero called 'The Soft Moon' in which the earth's metal and silicon surface is covered with great green globs of organic material that have been pulled to the earth by its own gravity, and now we, as human beings--the only rational animals on the planet--, must dig ourselves out of this mess and uncover our ancient steel edifices. And the list goes on and on . . . Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, &c. But the facts still stand, science has, historically, been ousted from many forms of literary art in favour of religion, sociology, psychology, and so on. Are we afraid of science because it makes literature seem less human?