Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 23, 2005

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a short story by the 20th century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. The story was first published in May 1940, in Spanish, in the Argentine journal Sur. The "postscript" dated 1947 is intended to be anachronistic, set seven years in the future. The first English-language translation of the story was published in 1961. Relatively long for Borges (approximately 5600 words), it is a work of speculative fiction and is most noted as a parabolic discussion of Berkeleian idealism. In the story, an encyclopedia article about a mysterious country called Uqbar is the first indication of Orbis Tertius, a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world - Tlön. In the course of the story, the narrator encounters increasingly substantive artifacts of Orbis Tertius and of Tlön; by the end of the story, Earth is becoming Tlön. (more...)

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