Jonathan Lethem , in a 1998 essay in the Village Voice entitled Close Encounters : The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction , suggested that the point in 1973 when Thomas Pynchon Gravity 's Rainbow was nominated for the Nebula Award and was passed over in favor of Clarke 's Rendezvous with Rama , stands as a hidden tombstone marking the death of the hope that SF was about to merge with the mainstream .