In his essay “Innovation Starvation”, Neal Stephenson defined a “hieroglyph”: a fully thought-out picture of an alternate reality with some innovation, with coherence and internal logic. A symbol, visual language and a narrative trope all at once, like Asimov’s robots or cyberpunk prosthetics. We automatically know what kind of story to expect seeing a neon-filled city on a rainy night - and descriptions of societal inequality in a futuristic setting bring out very specific pictures in our mind.