Hal Draper took a break from his life's work of promoting Marxism, and wrote one science fiction story. The information explosion, and associated storage and retrieval problems, is humorously examined in this short story. (This story is also of historical interest, containing one of the earliest predictions of the Web.)

Knowledge is expanding exponentially, as humanity fills the galaxy and then some. But advances in physics (which Draper describes in fictional mathematical terms) are able to keep up with the storage problem, until all of human knowledge, for all time to come, is packed into one drawer. Of course, there is one wee problem. Retrieval is ultimately macroscopic. And so the indexes grow. And when they get miniaturized, the indexes to the indexes grow. And so on, which then leads to a higher-order index of the iterated indexes, and then so on again. All this is spelled out in some detail.

The neverending recursion, while threatening to grow to Ackermann-like proportions, is still manageable. But when a spontaneously generated Gödelian self-reference is discovered in the indexing system, the whole lbry, and with it all of human civilization, collapses overnight. Absolutely hilarious.

This really deserves to be anthologized again. I just came across it in my old copy of 17 X Infinity and did a web search for Hal Draper when I could stop laughing long enough.

This story has a wicked twist in its last paragraph. I first read it in 17*Infinity at the age of nine or ten and have never forgotten it.

I read this story as a teen back when it first came out. At the time it seemed just OK. As I get older and computer and information technologies change (and mature?) I am reminded from time to time of this story by events in those fields.

The most recent event was this interesting article on nanotech. It won't be long before the "Virus" "Computer Virus" takes on the same old meaning as it does for people. As the hardware gets smaller, the story by Hal Draper seems to take on a more real quality. I wonder what Hollywood could do with it?

I read this as a 12 year old, and it has stayed with me, much as described by others. I lost the title for a good while to an imperfect memory. Amusingly, the story title and author (as well as this site) were retrieved for me by a Google Answers search based on a description of the plot.

November 2007: I did a search for this story at a time when the British Government appears to be threatened with meltdown over the loss of 2 data disks containing 25 million personal details. No one can find them and it is not known if they were lost, stolen or even roughly where they are. I immediately recalled this story which I haven't seen for about 40 years. To me the story is a reminder that whatever system you build you cannot factor out human error: it will always come to drop that banana-skin. Also it's a prophetic warning isued right at the start of the information age. In terms of maths it's probably at the philosophical end, and of course it employs a lot of very hilarious science pseudo-science jargon: I continued to chuckle about the "nudged quanta" for the next 40 years. It can be found on the internet within seconds: (some irony in that?)

A friend emailed me a scanned copy of the story and I decided to find out who this "Hal Draper" person was, since at age 61 and a lover of Science Fiction, I had never heard of him.

I discovered that "MS FND IN A LBRY" was probably the only evidence of a sense of humor ever exhibited by Hal Draper.

While Eric Hoffer did not exactly say that Communism was a Cult in "The True Believer," he did identify that for someone to write so extensively on the history of Marx and other founders of Communism indicates a level of obsessiveness and lack of a grasp of reality.

Too bad, because the realization that we are now in "The Age of Information Overload" is brilliant and indicates a real potential for a sense of humor by Draper.

But that's just my opinion.

I absolutely loved it. The humor was fantastic and right on target.

I sometimes wonder if Science Fiction's success in foretelling the future is purely random -- that is, umpteen thousand books and stories are bound to hit on something some of the time. I've always found it more rewarding to read SF for its literary qualities than for prognostication. But this (literally) unique story is special. Its prediction has come true to a large extent, and is unfortunately certain to be fulfilled. The composition is a perfect match of style to content. And its humor is not unworthy of the greatest of all SF comic artists, Robert Sheckley. All in all, a masterpiece.