So it's not obvious: what makes it very relevant today? It sounds interesting, but I don't immediately see the relevance to either 1973 or to 2013.
An often repeated massive simplification of its theme is that war reduces man to a cog in a machine so complex that no one can understand their function in the machine beyond being a cog, let alone the machine itself. Not too big of a stretch to replace "war" with "modern society" and see how it applies to life in modernity, the rocket could be replaced with any world changing tech, like AI. Pynchon goes considerably further than this in Gravity's Rainbow and has the main character attempt to understand which gives Pynchon (and the reader) a great deal of latitude for exploring society.
Read Gravity’s Rainbow instead.
