Thomas Pynchon’s Captain Blicero appears to be an archetypal baddie: a sadomasochistic, sexually indiscriminate pederast Nazi and the source of the mysterious 00000 V-2 rocket that is the white whale of Pynchon’s postmodern masterpiece Gravity’s Rainbow.

Blicero made his first appearance in Pynchon’s 1963 debut, V, as Lieutenant Weissman, a decadent German army officer stranded in the former South-West Africa seven years after it ceased to be a German colony. In this earlier novel, he is a mysterious, occasionally transvestite figure who appears to be engaged in a sadomasochistic relationship with the German agent Vera Merovering. He is sneaky too, potentially drugging and then stealing from another character, Kurt Mondaugen. More droll than disquieting, he is not yet a fully-fledged bad guy.

By the time he crops up again in Gravity’s Rainbow, 20 years later, he has metamorphosed into something quite different. Now an SS major, he is the commander of a V-2 rocket battery in the Netherlands, where he has imprisoned a young Dutch woman and a German boy. Blicero is a shocking figure; the prisoners are his sex slaves and when he first appears in the action he is “in high drag” and in the act of having sex with the young German, Gottfried. When it is revealed that his hostages are playing roles in a skewed Hansel and Gretel fantasy, in which he is the witch trying to lure the children into his Kinderofen, things do not get any less bizarre.

Over the course of the novel’s dense and plentiful pages, Blicero/Weissman is revealed to have first been the lover of a young Herero male in colonised South-West Africa, and later to have been a key figure in the Nazi rocket-building programme, during which he tortured a technician into designing a customised V-2 rocket for his own ends. With his penchant for quoting his favourite poet, Rilke, Weissman cuts a singular figure. He is described as both “balding, scholarly, peering up … through eyeglass lenses thick as bottles” and as “a brand new military type, part salesman, part scientist”. He is brutal: “the sadist [with the] responsibility for coming up with new game variations building towards a maximum cruelty.”

There is little doubt that Weissman is death-obsessed. He even takes the name Dominus Blicero as his SS codename because it was a Teutonic nickname for death himself. In the novel’s penultimate section, we see him “in his final madness” as he abandons humanity altogether and embraces the ultimate destructiveness of the rocket. He has mutated into “another animal … a werewolf … but with no humanity left in its eyes”.

As long-time readers and viewers of the recent Inherent Vice adaptation can attest, Pynchon can never be accused of stinting on his creations. He is often criticised for creating cartoonish characters, and Weissman at first seems to fit this mould. But his African partner’s description of the early Weissman casts him in a more wistful light. He was, Enzian says, “a young man, in love with empire, poetry, his own arrogance”, but at the same time his “thirst for guilt was as insatiable as the desert’s for water”. He is human after all: another son of empire who is ultimately corrupted by its “mission to propagate death”.

Despite the satirical and ridiculous nature of Blicero, he embodies an important real-world point. He is a composite of the fears and prejudices of the post-Cuban missile crisis era in which this 1973 novel was composed. Perverse and unsettling, he represents the unabashed wickedness that lies at the heart of man’s romance with deadly technologies. His corrupted idealism is meant to bring to mind the Nazi rocket scientists, such as Wernher von Braun, who were transplanted from Germany to Texas immediately after the war to work on the American space programme.

Many of those scientists were exonerated of crimes they committed or were privy to, and became fixtures of American public life. Thus the anger in the line: “If you’re wondering where he has gone, look among the successful academics, the presidential advisers, the token intellectuals who sit on boards of directors. He is almost certainly there. Look high, not low.” For all his preposterousness, an uncanny undercurrent of history underpins this baddie. Pynchon characterises evil in such a way as to confront us with history’s complacent attitude to the baddies of the real world.