Some bright spark decided that the new edition of George Orwell's 1984 should contain a forward by (wait for it) Thomas Pynchon. Brilliant. Boing Boing quotes a bit of the "look how right he was in today's context" stuff:

"Looking around us at the present moment in the US, for example, we note the popularity of helicopters as a resource of "law enforcement," familiar to us from countless televised "crime dramas," themselves forms of social control - and for that matter at the ubiquity of television itself...News is whatever the government says it is, surveillance of ordinary citizens has entered the mainstream of police activity, reasonable search and seizure is a joke."

I picked up my dogeared copy of Vineland to look for a quote that this reminded me of, only to find it's spoken by the narrator at the infamous (oh my gosh, it's a plot it's a plot) "1984 Thanatoid Roast." The subject is the town of Holytail, California, a last bastion of hippy holdouts from the mainstream and magical interfaces between imagined worlds which is sooner or later "due for the full treatment, from which it would emerge, like most of the Emerald Triangle, pacified territory -- reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behaviour, maybe a cookie."

Long may he rave.