How does this exchange summarize the story's distinction between life in the postmodern era and the utopian ideals of modernism? Does the story in any way sentimentalize the postmodern world? What was the failure of modernism, and why is the "bundle of condensed catastrophe" the narrator bears in the story's closing line preferable to the "Tomorrow That Never Was"?
2. In his strongest hallucination, the narrator sees a young man and woman from the tomorrow that never was, and describes them as possessing "the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda." As a curative for the hallucinations, however, the narrator's acquaintance Merv Kihn recommends a movie called "Nazi Love Motel."
What is the connection between these two references to Nazi Germany, and what does the context of the references signify regarding the larger vision of twentieth-century history presented in the story? How important, for instance, is the narrator's comment that "the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night"? Or his comment that "Los Angeles was a bad idea"?
3. What is a "semiotic ghost"? In the first paragraph of the story, the narrator observes that "television helped a lot." What does the story appear to be suggesting about how television shapes perception and experience?
Merv Kihn, describing a case of hallucination, comments that "she'd have seen the devil, if she hadn't been brought up on ‘The Bionic Man,’ and all those ‘Star Trek’ reruns." In the context of the story, is this shift in consciousness perceived as a positive, negative, or mixed evolution in the development of Western civilization?