Whether the world be finite, and whether there be more than one world...

"To describe the world is to create another."

Summary

To describe the world is to create another. A disembodied narrator recounts the life and death of Pliny the Elder, author of the first encyclopedia. Excerpts from Pliny’s "Naturalis Historia," echo between past and present, real and virtual, tracing the evolution of knowledge from written encyclopedias to modern AI algorithms.