Here are my top ten reasons you will enjoy this most inventive and ingenious tale:

1. Fabulist gone wild: This Jorge Luis Borges tale, especially the first few pages, reads like a cross between Philip K. Dick and a bibliophile on acid. There are enough references, many real, many fabricated, to keep a team of researchers burning the midnight oil. My advice: Have fun reading. I sense an author with initials JLB playing literary, metaphysical and many other types of games with his tongue deep in his cheek.

2. Mysterious Narrator: “From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them.” Mirrors are monstrous? Inevitable at night, really? Have to admit I’ve never myself had such a thought. Maybe I should correct ‘bibliophile on acid’ to ‘bibliophile stoned on cannabis’. The story is told in first person but are we entirely sure who is doing the telling?

3. Strange Uqbar: Those ancient orthodox believers from Uqbar exiled to a nearby island owned obelisks and lived in a way, as archeologists discovered “where it is not uncommon to unearth stone mirrors.” Stone mirrors? How exactly does a stone mirror work? Perhaps a mirror in a stone frame? Well, the narrator admits the document he and Bioy Casares are reading are less than clear, “Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness.” Sound vaguely familiar? Like this fourteen page short story we have in our hands, perhaps?

4. Stranger Tlön: We learn Tlön isn’t a chaos or an irresponsible license of the imagination but it has its own set laws, at least provisionally. Provisionally? So, in a real sense, the license of the imagination rules out. This being the case, I’d love to travel there sometime.

5. Mind Games: For the inhabitants of Tlön, the world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; rather, it’s a series of independent acts. Wow! How cool is that? Whatever you are looking at, hearing, feeling, tasting or smelling – it is all in the mind.

6. Mooning: There are serious language games and tricks going down in Tlön and the inhabitants are entirely serious. For example, when you point to the moon, you don’t see the moon or say the word ‘moon’; you are mooning.

7. The Right Word: On Tlön, there are poems made up of one enormous word. Now that’s poetry I could get into. Does anybody have one long word poem they would care to share?

8. Timeless: On Tlön, they do not perceive the spacial exists in time. Everything is seen as merely an association of ideas. I love it – a world without watches. Sounds like the inhabitants of Tlön take their leisure seriously, since without time and watches, it would be rather difficult to adhere to a work schedule.

9. Touchy-Feely: The geometry of Tlön is made up of two different disciplines – the visual and the tactile. I always wanted to know what all those triangles and circles and lines and points felt like.

10. The Unsaid: All the many subtle references to various theories and ideas. For example, one text states that “Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.” This written statement compared to what the narrator says Bioy Casares remembers the text saying – “mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.” Sounds like the narrator might be noting a Freudian slip made by his friend.
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Here are my top ten reasons you will enjoy this most inventive and ingenious tale:

1. Fabulist gone wild: This Jorge Luis Borges tale, especially the first few pages, reads like a cross between Philip K. Dick and a bibliophile on acid. There are enough references, many real, many fabricated, to keep a team of researchers burning the midnight oil. My advice: Have fun reading. I sense an author with initials JLB playing literary, metaphysical and many other types of games with his tongue deep in his cheek.

2. Mysterious Narrator: “From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied upon us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them.” Mirrors are monstrous? Inevitable at night, really? Have to admit I’ve never myself had such a thought. Maybe I should correct ‘bibliophile on acid’ to ‘bibliophile stoned on cannabis’. The story is told in first person but are we entirely sure who is doing the telling?

3. Strange Uqbar: Those ancient orthodox believers from Uqbar exiled to a nearby island owned obelisks and lived in a way, as archeologists discovered “where it is not uncommon to unearth stone mirrors.” Stone mirrors? How exactly does a stone mirror work? Perhaps a mirror in a stone frame? Well, the narrator admits the document he and Bioy Casares are reading are less than clear, “Reading it over again, we discovered beneath its rigorous prose a fundamental vagueness.” Sound vaguely familiar? Like this fourteen page short story we have in our hands, perhaps?

4. Stranger Tlön: We learn Tlön isn’t a chaos or an irresponsible license of the imagination but it has its own set laws, at least provisionally. Provisionally? So, in a real sense, the license of the imagination rules out. This being the case, I’d love to travel there sometime.

5. Mind Games: For the inhabitants of Tlön, the world for them is not a concourse of objects in space; rather, it’s a series of independent acts. Wow! How cool is that? Whatever you are looking at, hearing, feeling, tasting or smelling – it is all in the mind.

6. Mooning: There are serious language games and tricks going down in Tlön and the inhabitants are entirely serious. For example, when you point to the moon, you don’t see the moon or say the word ‘moon’; you are mooning.

7. The Right Word: On Tlön, there are poems made up of one enormous word. Now that’s poetry I could get into. Does anybody have one long word poem they would care to share?

8. Timeless: On Tlön, they do not perceive the spacial exists in time. Everything is seen as merely an association of ideas. I love it – a world without watches. Sounds like the inhabitants of Tlön take their leisure seriously, since without time and watches, it would be rather difficult to adhere to a work schedule.

9. Touchy-Feely: The geometry of Tlön is made up of two different disciplines – the visual and the tactile. I always wanted to know what all those triangles and circles and lines and points felt like.

10. The Unsaid: All the many subtle references to various theories and ideas. For example, one text states that “Mirrors and fatherhood are abominable because they multiply and disseminate that universe.” This written statement compared to what the narrator says Bioy Casares remembers the text saying – “mirrors and copulation are abominable because they increase the number of men.” Sounds like the narrator might be noting a Freudian slip made by his friend.
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At work, I have a book called "Building the Uqbar Dinghy." It had never occurred to me, although I was aware of this Borges story's existence, that before the publication of this boatbuilding book, there was no such thing as an Uqbar dinghy. Now there is - presumably. Of course, that's exactly what the author was getting at when he titled the book (Borges is credited).

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a wonderful musing on the relationships between ideas, the written word, and reality. The narrator tells the reader of discovering a seemingly unique article slipped into a single copy of an encyclopedia, detailing (but vaguely) the profile of a country called Uqbar. As it turns out, Uqbar may not exist (or, may not have existed?) in our world, but may exist in a parallel world called Tlön. Tlön may be wholly the invention of a secret group of intellectuals who have conspired to create a hidden imaginary history - but their fabulist inventions seem to be sneakily creeping their way into our existence.

The story is aesthetically appealing to any lover of fantasy worlds - and any bibliophile. It's delightfully multi-layered, with truth and fiction inextricably tangled. And it's beautifully written.

Read due to its nomination for the 1941 Retro-Hugos. This one gets my vote. ( )

At work, I have a book called "Building the Uqbar Dinghy." It had never occurred to me, although I was aware of this Borges story's existence, that before the publication of this boatbuilding book, there was no such thing as an Uqbar dinghy. Now there is - presumably. Of course, that's exactly what the author was getting at when he titled the book (Borges is credited).

"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" is a wonderful musing on the relationships between ideas, the written word, and reality. The narrator tells the reader of discovering a seemingly unique article slipped into a single copy of an encyclopedia, detailing (but vaguely) the profile of a country called Uqbar. As it turns out, Uqbar may not exist (or, may not have existed?) in our world, but may exist in a parallel world called Tlön. Tlön may be wholly the invention of a secret group of intellectuals who have conspired to create a hidden imaginary history - but their fabulist inventions seem to be sneakily creeping their way into our existence.

The story is aesthetically appealing to any lover of fantasy worlds - and any bibliophile. It's delightfully multi-layered, with truth and fiction inextricably tangled. And it's beautifully written.

Read due to its nomination for the 1941 Retro-Hugos. This one gets my vote. ( )

Tantalizing glimpse into an invented world. ( )