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"I do think there is a link in that in both cases, writing fiction or writing a computer program, at any given moment you're focusing on a very specific and particular thing—one word, one line of code, whatever."
- Neal Stephenson

Static House  
  A house that was once fully psychotropic and malleable, but which had been frozen in one configuration.  

Along the beaches of Vermillion Sands, most people prefered psychotropic houses that could change to fit the mood of the occupant. Some home owners, however, owing to their mental instability or extreme moods, had so affected their houses for the worse that the houses needed to be frozen in one state to be usable.

Curiously, Stamers was in no hurry to switch on. He pointed to left and right as we made our way up the glass staircase to the terrace, underlining various attractive features, but made no effort to find the control console, and I suspected that the house might be a static conversion - a fair number of PT houses are frozen in one or other position at the end of their working lives, and make tolerable static homes.
From The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, by J.G. Ballard.
Published by Amazing Fact and Science Fiction in 1962
Additional resources -

SF writers sometimes go a long distance to show you something new, like a psychotropic house, and how great they are, and then suddenly return you to your dull present with a term like "static home."

A similar kind of term would be groundcar, an ordinary automobile in a world of aircars.

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista
  More Ideas and Technology by J.G. Ballard
  Tech news articles related to The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista
  Tech news articles related to works by J.G. Ballard

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