(1961), includes among its cast of characters a cyborg set anachronistically in Victorian-era Egypt (a type of writing now called steampunk). This story, significantly reworked by Pynchon, appears as Chapter 3 of V. "The Secret Integration" (1964), Pynchon's last published short story, is a sensitively handled coming-of-age tale in which a group of young boys face the consequences of the American policy of racial integration. At one point in the story, the boys attempt to understand the new policy by way of the mathematical operation, the only sense of the word with which they are familiar. The Crying of Lot 49 also alludes to entropy and communication theory, and contains scenes and descriptions which parody or appropriate calculus, Zeno's paradoxes, and the thought experiment known as Maxwell's demon. At the same time, the novel also investigates homosexuality, celibacy and both medically sanctioned and illicit psychedelic drug use. Gravity's Rainbow describes many varieties of sexual fetishism (including sado-masochism, coprophilia and a borderline case of tentacle erotica), and features numerous episodes of drug use, most notably cannabis but also cocaine, naturally occurring hallucinogens, and the mushroom Amanita muscaria. Gravity's Rainbow also derives much from Pynchon's background in mathematics: at one point, the geometry of garter belts is compared with that of cathedral spires, both described as mathematical singularities. Mason & Dixon explores the scientific, theological, and socio-cultural foundations of the Age of Reason while also depicting the relationships between actual historical figures and fictional characters in intricate detail and, like Gravity's Rainbow, is an archetypal example of the genre of historiographic metafiction. Influence Precursors Pynchon's novels refer overtly to writers as disparate as Henry Adams (in V., p. 62), Jorge Luis Borges (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 264), Deleuze and Guattari (in Vineland, p. 97), Emily Dickinson (in Gravity’s Rainbow, pp. 27–8), Umberto Eco (in Mason & Dixon, p. 559), Ralph Waldo Emerson (in Vineland, p. 369), "Hopkins, T. S. Eliot, di Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros" (in V., p. 307), William March, Vladimir Nabokov (in The Crying of Lot 49, p. 120), Patrick O'Brian (in Mason & Dixon, p. 54), Ishmael Reed (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 558), Rainer Maria Rilke (in Gravity’s Rainbow, p. 97 f) and Ludwig Wittgenstein (in V., p. 278 f), and to a heady mixture of iconic religious and philosophical sources. Critics have made comparisons of Pynchon's writing with works by Rabelais, Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne,