The narrator is an American photographer working in the 1980s. His current assignment is to cover examples of futuristic 1930s architecture, industrial design, and popular culture (predominantly sci-fi illustrations) in the style known as Streamlined Moderne. His publishers in London, Cohen and Dialta Downes, encourage him to think of the style as depicting “a kind of alternate America: a 1980 that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams” (28). On assignment in California, the narrator describes details of various examples of the style, such as “A Flying Car” (25), “old Amazing Stories pulps” (26), and “raygun emplacements.” He agrees with his publishers, realizing that what was imagined to be the future in the 1930s is unlike what has been realized in the 1980s.

The more involved he becomes in his assignment, the more his obsession with the objects of the Streamlined Moderne grows. He begins seeing objects that aren’t really there, like a futuristic “flying-wing liner” (24). At the same time, he is aware that he is most likely hallucinating. He turns to his friend Kihn for advice. Kihn remarks that the hallucinations are “[s]emiotic ghosts,” bits of cultural imagery that have become so widespread and reused that they form part of the collective unconsciousness of what the alternative, imagined future looks like.