I turned the switch and none of the lights came on

[sovay]

I just heard a child's voice sing-songing outside my window: "I got a sha-dow." It's after eight o'clock. Nobody's got a shadow by this light, kid. Nobody's even got an artificially cast shadow in the part of the driveway your voice was coming from because I'd have seen our neighbors' god-awful annoying light wink on and it didn't. None of the people in the back yard have kids with them, either, I checked. Is it Lemuria again already?

I realized in conversation with ranalore that I may well have encountered the idea of ghosts-as-recordings for the first time in Diana Wynne Jones' A Tale of Time City (1987). The eponymous pocket universe doesn't have ghosts in the sense of spirits of the dead, but it's chock-full of ghosts as scars on time, transcending linearity: "They happen because the City keeps using the same piece of space and time over and over again. If a person does the same thing often enough, they leave a mark in the air, like the ones you just saw. Habit-ghosts, we call them. There's another kind called once-ghosts . . . [They] happen when whatever they're doing is so important or so emotional that they leave a mark like the habit-ghosts."

While we're at it, have the ghost of an entire landscape: "'Reconstruction' begins of stone age lands lost to North Sea." "If this is successful it will be the first time anybody will have produced such evidence for settlements in the deep waters of the North Sea. This will be a real first. That would be new knowledge of what is really a lost continent."

Comments

[umadoshi]

the idea of ghosts-as-recordings

It's such an eerie notion. (As it should be, I realize. But.)

[alexxkay]

I once ran a tabletop RPG where part of the (initially secret) backstory was that there had been a pretty advanced technological civilization at the end of the last ice age, wiped out suddenly and cataclysmically. But because then, as now, the vast majority of humanity lived within a mile of the sea, by the time civilization re-emerged, all the ruins were drowned.

[poliphilo]

I've been racking my brains- and I keep coming back to Lord Lytton's The Haunted and the Haunters (1859). Lytton's narrator is convinced that the ghosts in the house he's investigating have been generated artificially- and in due course discovers a room in which an alchemist has set up a peculiar scientific/magical apparatus which in combination with his undying will is causing events from the house's past to be replayed. It's not exactly The Stone Tape but it's getting there.

[thisbluespirit]

They should just come and look at my beach! :-D (Well, not that there's so much left of petrified Doggerland to look at it now; it's been covered up again.)

[cmcmck]

Even when it isn't there, you still have it! :o)

[thanate]

Yay Doggerland! Thanks for linking; I hope they find all sorts of fun things. :)