Small Gods

49

Libraries of unwritten books are of course very rare, but do tend to crop up occasionally in L-Space. The library described in the opening section of Beyond Life by James Branch Cabell contains the novels of David Copperfield as well as Milton’s King Arthur. In Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Lucien’s library (a direct homage to Cabell) also contains books that were never written, such as Alice’s Journey Beyond The Moon by Lewis Carroll, The Lost Road by J. R. R. Tolkien, and P. G. Wodehouse’s Psmith and Jeeves. There’s also a library of future books in Robin McKinley’s novel Beauty.

Finally, other people were reminded of the library in Jorge Luis Borges’ story The Library of Babel, where a vast universe is described which contains all possible books (assuming a finite alphabet and a fixed book size the number of all possible books is mindbogglingly huge, but finite) — in random order. Most books in such a library would appear written by the ‘monkey and typewriter’ brigade, but all the coherent books, whether actually written or not, are in there as well.

All libraries are connected through L-Space anyway, aren’t they?