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![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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."
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."
