{"id":15541,"date":"2017-06-18T12:09:30","date_gmt":"2017-06-18T19:09:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2017\/06\/18\/15541.html"},"modified":"2017-06-18T12:09:30","modified_gmt":"2017-06-18T19:09:30","slug":"ziggurat-imagery-in-different","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2017\/06\/18\/ziggurat-imagery-in-different\/","title":{"rendered":"Ziggurat imagery in different tech levels"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>I've just started reading both Norman Spinrad's 1980 <cite>Songs from the Stars<\/cite> (first chapters set in a post-apocalypse quasi-ecotopia in what used to be California) and William Gibson's 1993 <cite>Virtual Light<\/cite> (first chapter set in a cyberpunkish near-future Mexico City).<\/p>\n<p>I was already amused by the contrasting attitudes toward high tech, and then I noticed that they both use a particular word, for fairly different scenes.<\/p>\n<p>From <cite>Songs from the Stars<\/cite>, p. 21:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&ldquo;The mountains began abruptly at the northern end of the dry lake bed; from this angle, the Sierras were a vast ziggurat staircase reaching upward and eastward.&rdquo;\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>From <cite>Virtual Light<\/cite>, p. 2:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p>&ldquo;But here the mirrored ziggurats down L\u00e1zaro C\u00e1rdenas flow with the luminous flesh of giants, shunting out the night's barrage of dreams to the waiting <i>avenidas<\/i>&#8212;business as usual, world without end.&rdquo;<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve just started reading both Norman Spinrad&#8217;s 1980 Songs from the Stars (first chapters set in a post-apocalypse quasi-ecotopia in&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,48,27,78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-commonplace-book","category-speculative-fiction","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15541"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15541\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}