Employing their imaginations with varying degrees of credulity, authors have created a cornucopia of variations on the encyclopedia. Most command more interest for commenting on the nature of knowledge than for the actual knowledge they contain. We’ve listed 10 of the most bizarre below:
1. Encyclopedia Galactica from the works of Isaac Asimov
Nothing about Asimov lacked for scale—not the intimidating size of his muttonchops, nor the Voltairian scope of his prose, nor the thoroughness of his imagined encyclopedia. Allegedly created as a comment on the Encyclopedia Britanica, the Encyclopedia Galactica is the repository of knowledge collected by an imagined, interstellar empire. In addition to Asimov’s works, the encyclopedia appears in novels by Douglas Adams and Arthur C. Clarke among others.
2. Nazi Literature in the Americas by Roberto Bolaño
Nazi Literature in the Americas describes the exploits of fictional South American authors of the far Right, treating each of these subjects as if he or she were an entry in a literary encyclopedia. Bolaño alternately mocks and recoils from these figures, ultimately placing himself incongruously in their midst.
3. The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges
Though hailing from one of literature’s greatest fabulists, The Book of Imaginary Beings is in fact a straightforward affair. With descriptions of magical creatures ranging from the well known (H.G. Wells’ morlocks) to the mystifyingly obscure (catoblepas?), the text impressively accounts for the imagination’s orphans.
4. The Key to All Mythologies in Middlemarch
by George Eliot
The life’s work of bloodless scholar Edward Casaubon, The Key to All Mythologies serves as one of Middlemarch’s myriad of dark tricks. Though Casaubon sedulously applies himself to creating this mythological omnibus, he lacks the vitality for self-creation that allowed his beloved mythology to exist in the first place. The Key, like Casaubon himself, is ultimately a failure in the end.
5. Vestrand’s Extelopedia in 44 Magnetomes in Imaginary Magnitude by Stanislaw Lem
Lem’s metafictional conceits often reach Borgesian heights of absurdity, never more so than in Imaginary Magnitude—a collection of criticism concerning imaginary books. Verstrand’s Extelopedia figures among this number, as do a great many works on the receiving end of Lem’s satirical wit.