Say it over and over again to yourself, until you believe it: Jorge Luis Borges is not a science fiction writer.
Spend a few minutes, if you never have before, reading Borges' The Library of Babel. Despair has never looked so beautiful. The narrator describes life in a universe that consists of nothing but an array of rooms, endlessly replicated horizontally and vertically. Each room contains the same number of bookshelves; each shelf, the same number of books; each book, the same number of pages, and even letters.
The narrator is one of the librarians, the humans who struggle to live in and make sense of the library. Nearly all the contents of the books are gibberish, yet very occassionaly someone will discover a startling order, sometimes even a short passage of coherent meaning, in a randomly-selected book.
Any human seeks order and meaning. This story shows how randomness and chaos always produce tantalizing moments of coincidence that the human mind thinks is portentious. In this library one will find no monkeys, not to mention typewriters, but no doubt if one traveled far enough, one would eventually find the book that contains Hamlet.
Typically I hate such stories and want to quarrel with them. (Would such a thing as a library be generated by chaos? Better to posit an inscrutible or even cruel creator!) Here, I felt swept along by the vision, even if I wasn't tempted by it, probably because Borges' prose is, well, gorgeous. Even in translation, the orderly and precise exposition combined with a gentle, insistent tone of absolute futility matches perfectly the strange monomaniacal regimentation of the library combined with the hysterical gibbering nonsense of the texts it contains.
Hysterical, suffocating, and terrifying:
[T]he Library is total and that its shelves register all the possible combinations of the twenty-odd orthographical symbols (a number which, though extremely vast, is not infinite): Everything: the minutely detailed history of the future, the archangels' autobiographies, the faithful catalogues of the Library, thousands and thousands of false catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of those catalogues, the demonstration of the fallacy of the true catalogue, the Gnostic gospel of Basilides, the commentary on that gospel, the commentary on the commentary on that gospel, the true story of your death, the translation of every book in all languages, the interpolations of every book in all books.
My eyes hurt.
This review was inspired by Stefan Beck's post about Borges at The Horizon. He wrote something at the end that raised my hackles, responding to the suggestion that Borges' library prefigured the internet:
In fairness, it’s a potentially intriguing connection—but one can’t help thinking it diminishes Borges’s great achievement. He wasn’t an SF writer. It’s unlikely that he cared to see the future, even though the Aleph was supposed to let him see everything at once. Google, Facebook, and Wikipedia have turned out to be nothing but a load of faddish, privacy-invading trouble, and if you can’t see Borges sub specie aeternitatis, can you see him at all?
Oh no! Not that old nonsense! Is Beck asserting the inherent inferiority of SF? Thus, if you find something good, it must be anything but SF? Well, no. I was going to leave a complaint in the comments section of Beck's post, but then I read more carefully. Beck defines SF (reasonably) as futuristic; alt worlds located in interterminent time periods belong in the category of speculative fiction. So, Beck is okay on that point. (On the other hand, what is this nonsense about Google being "nothing but...trouble"? Is he ... crazy?)
I'm glad that our world is infinitely richer (if not larger) than Babel's Library, and that our world's Creator is generally kinder (if even more inscrutible). I wouldn't want to live in the Library; nevertheless, I wouldn't mind a visit.