The motifs of geography and mapping that are prominent in many of Thomas Pynchon’s novels are closely connected to an issue that concerns their own quality as fictional texts: representation. Pynchon’s narratives routinely explore the connection between the word and the world, between language and what it expresses, between fiction and reality, or between a sign and what it stands for, and their explorations hardly provide straightforward or simple answers but rather open up complex realms of ambiguity and multiplicity. Geography and mapping provide a crucial metaphorical tool in addressing those issues, as both are fundamentally preoccupied with the representation of the world and its inscription, and they engage in processes that are closely related to those of fiction. In particular, the double meaning of “geography” is useful as a framework here, since the term means “writing the Earth” not only in the sense of representing it in a chosen medium (text, map, etc.) but also in the sense of constructing the Earth in writing, inscribing it as much as describing it. Both processes are inextricably linked, as they are in the writing of fictional worlds, and thus geographies in Pynchon’s novels always invite a self-reflexive reading in terms of their own textual practices of representation and invention.