“I feel in Borges a curious implication: the unrealities of physical science and the senseless repetitions of history have made the world outside the library an uninhabitable vacuum,” John Updike wrote in an essay about Borges in 1965. “Just as physical man, in his cities, has manufactured an environment whose scope and challenge and hostility eclipse that of the natural world, so literate man has heaped up a counterfeit universe capable of supporting life.”

Borges was not just interested in literary artifice, as Updike points out, but fundamentally concerned with the nature of reality, a preoccupation that often led him to interrogate the scope and organization of human knowledge. As a result, information technology—including infinite books and omniscient orbs—features prominently in his work.

In Borges’s story, The Aleph, published in 1967, he describes “a small iridescent sphere of almost intolerable brilliance,” from which it is possible to view infinite objects from all points in the universe. “I saw the heavy-laden sea,” says the narrator, also called Borges, as he describes peering into the so-called Aleph, “I saw the dawn and the dusk; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silver-plated cobweb at the center of a black pyramid; I saw a tattered labyrinth (it was London); I saw interminable eyes nearby looking at me as if in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors in the planet and none reflected me.”

There’s a long storytelling tradition of using fantastical information systems and otherworldly infrastructure for knowledge as a way to explore humans’ place in the larger universe. Libraries are often important, but they’re not always good. Fictional institutions differ dramatically in structure and function, but the dark undercurrent—the repository for human knowledge as a foreboding place—is a constant across countless stories.

H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Out of Time features ominous beings that spend their days at a library reading “terrible books from the endless shelves and writing for hours at great tables,” cataloguing all civilizations of the past and future. “Their vast libraries housed the records of every species that had ever been or that ever would be—their arts, achievements, languages, and psychologies,” Lovecraft writes. “With this aeon-embracing knowledge, the great race chose from every era and lifeform such thoughts, arts, and processes as might suit their own nature and situation. They could mentally project themselves through time until they approached their desired period.”

In Jim C. Hines’s Libriomancer, the protagonist has the ability to reach into the pages of a book and pull out three-dimensional objects. (Including vampires, which leak out with them.) Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman features a library full of books that were dreamed into existence. Several of Isaac Asimov’s books include references to a galactic library where the entirety of human knowledge is digitally indexed in real-time. The television show Doctor Who has an two-part episode about a dying girl whose consciousness is preserved in a computer program within a planet-sized library, giving her access to all of recorded human knowledge. In all of these cases, there is a price to pay for access to remarkable troves of information.