sentences:  Characterised by Downes as 'American Streamlined Moderne', a "kind of alternate America...A 1980 that never happened, an architecture of broken dreams", or what Cohen calls 'Raygun Gothic', his encounters with a world of California gas stations, fifth run movie houses likened to "the temples of some lost sect", a utopian 'continuum' of flying wings and air cars, multi-lane highways, giant zeppelins and Aryan inhabitants, lead him to hallucination as the scenes of the period spill into reality.His US agent Kihn attributes this to what he calls 'semiotic ghosts', the remnants of mass culture in the collective unconscious, and advises immersion in a pulp diet of pornography and TV.In references to the architecture of Nazi Germany, the Hitler Youth and period sci-fi like Flash Gordon, Fritz Lang and H. G. Wells, the modernist vistas of the 'golden age' are contextualized in period political visions as the protagonist clings to a familiar and preferred postmodern present.