On Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars, "the landscape itself speaks" in "a kind of glossolalia," a meaningless jumble" (Red Mars,546); the geologist who nevertheless understands it speaks its "ideolect of shapes" (GreenMars,409). This conjunction of the meaningless and the linguistic-sometimes by way of the appeal to glossolalia, sometimes by way of an appeal to the model of a computer virus, sometimes (as in Stephenson's Snow Crash) by both-is almost a staple of science fiction in the 1990s, but its interest was noted as early as 1967 by the artist Robert Smithson, who prefaces one of his own essays with an epigraph from J. G. Ballard and who associates what he calls Ballard's "environmental coding' with the "coded channels" of computers: "All the content is removed from the 'memory' of an automaton and transformed into a 'shape' or 'object' " (342). In Ballard, what this produces are "landscapes" "covered by strange ciphers," "tall palms" that look like "the symbols of some cryptic alphabet," lakes and limestone hills that speak in "inaudible voices."