Description from Scraps of the Untainted Sky by utopian critic Thomas Moylan:
One of the most avant-garde stories of the [SF] New Wave, Pamela Zoline’s “Heat Death of the Universe” [was] written in 1967. […] By equating the second law of thermodynamics (the entropic heat death of the universe) with the growing dissolution of one woman’s everyday life, Zoline conjoins the macro and the micro, the metaphysical and the physical, the death of the universe with the banal and oppressive implosion of an apparently “normal” life.
The story opens with the invocation of "ontology" in the first of the fifty-four “sections” that make up the text, but by section 9 it identifies its protagonist as Sarah Boyle, who is “a vivacious and intelligent young wife and mother, educated at a fine Eastern college, proud of her growing family which keeps her busy and happy around the house” (Zoline 295). […] The California setting is expressed as a metaphor of the "whole world" in which
all topographical imperfections [have been] sanded away with the sweet-smelling burr of the plastic surgeon's cosmetic polisher; a world populace dieting, leisured, similar in pink and mauve hair and rhinestone shades. A land Cunt Pink and Avocado Green, brassiered and girdled by monstrous complexities of Super Highways, a California endless and unceasing, embracing and transforming the entire globe. (Zoline 295)[The story] offers a strong indictment of the meaninglessness of everyday life in the “affluent society” of postwar suburban America. More ontological than political, it nevertheless is a timely anticapitalist and protofeminist critique of the subjected position of women. […] And yet the twinned ontological inevitabilities of domestic reality and cosmic entropy underscore a metaphysical conviction of chaos, disorder, and death that underwrites any utopian possibility.
Moylan, Thomas. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: science fiction, utopia, dystopia. Boulder: Westview Press, 2000. 177-80.
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