I am currently reading an excellent book by the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges called Labyrinths. It’s a collection of some of his short stories and fictional essays. When I say short, I mean very short, most of them are less than ten pages, some of them are only a few lines. Many of them are summaries of made-up books, or small reports about a fictional character; others are tales of fictional worlds, often similar to our own, but with striking differences.

For example, the story “The Lottery In Babylon” is about a society where everything is decided by lottery. Your social status, wealth, even your mortality can change from week to week, decided by a random system of compulsory lottery. The story is about the journey the country took from having a weekly money lottery to the lottery company consuming the whole society.

Another story, “The Library Of Babel” is about a world which is an infinite library; an ever interlinking collection of bookshelves. The books contain every possible collection of words and letters in the language of Babel (and all possible languages using it’s characters). The inhabitants of this world spend their days looking for the “Ultimate book” which will explain all the others; however, as the chance of a book even having a legible sentence (legible to the inhabitants of the library that is) is so minuscule, it makes the task of finding the “ultimate book” almost impossible.

I cannot think it unlikely that there is such a total book on some shelf in the universe. I pray to the unknown gods that some man—even a single man, tens of centuries ago—has perused and read this book. If the honor and wisdom and joy of such a reading are not to be my own, then let them be for others. Let heaven exist, though my own place may be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

I am amazed by his imagination, the ability to think up such inventive plots and ideas is a skill I would love to have. I think short stories can often be just as powerful as a full novel, and I’d certainly recommended reading some of Borges’ work.