Great news for fans of massive, unexplained Siberian explosions. The Tunguska Event is finally getting the highbrow literary treatement it deserves.

An article in the Guardian says that Pynchon’s new novel – his first in nine years – features the T.E. as a plot point. The Guardian says:

“A description of the [untitled] book – apparently written by Pynchon himself – has been posted on Amazon.com. It offers a tantalising glimpse of the coming work.

“Spanning the period between the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and the years just after world war I, this novel moves from the labour troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.”

As you may know, the Tunguska Event was this huge aerial explosion in Russia in 1908 that wiped out 500,000 acres of pine trees. Lots of theories about what happened — a comet, antimatter, UFOs — but no one’s totally sure. I’ll buy that book just for Pynchon’s take on the T.E.