The Universal Library in Fiction
Science fiction has used the device of a library which is universal in the sense that it not only contains all existing written works, but all possible written works. This idea appeared in Kurd Lasswitz's 1901 story "The Universal Library" and Borges's essay "The Total Library" before its more famous expression in Borges's story "The Library of Babel". Such a library, however, would be as useless as it would be complete. A similar idea was a planet called Memory Alpha, (from the Star Trek episode "The Lights of Zetar") which was the Federation's "storehouse of computer databases containing all cultural history and scientific data it has acquired.". It has been commented that the Internet already approaches this state.
In Discworld, Terry Pratchett's fantasy world, all libraries in the multiverse being connected in "L-space", effectively creating a single, semi-universal, library.
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Famous quotes containing the words universal, library and/or fiction:
“Commercial jazz, soap opera, pulp fiction, comic strips, the movies set the images, mannerisms, standards, and aims of the urban masses. In one way or another, everyone is equal before these cultural machines; like technology itself, the mass media are nearly universal in their incidence and appeal. They are a kind of common denominator, a kind of scheme for pre-scheduled, mass emotions.”
—C. Wright Mills (1916–62)
“The fear of failure is so great, it is no wonder that the desire to do right by one’s children has led to a whole library of books offering advice on how to raise them.”
—Bruno Bettelheim (20th century)
“... the main concern of the fiction writer is with mystery as it is incarnated in human life.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)