[schaefer]

The thing I love about Borges is that he is both a big-idea sci fi writer and a poet. and his poetry definitely shows through in his sci fi. For example, as in "The Zahir". The thought of a person obsessing about the beauty of the shadow of a rose really does it for me.

But I like his big idea stories too. Absolutely "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" may be his masterpiece. But it's dense for an introduction to the author. Contrast this with "The Secret Miracle" which also has a beautiful big idea, but it's so elegantly small. in a sense the whole story fits into just one second.

Finally, I went overboard and calculated the number of books on the shelves in "the library of babel". I remember distinctly that the story made our very real universe feel small for the first time in my life. and to think, I barely scratched the surface. a whole book was published about the math in that one story alone: "The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel" by William Goldbloom Bloch.