Ms Fnd in a Lbry

Ms Fnd in a Library or probably pronounced, Manuscript Found in a Library (Manuscript found in a library) is a satirical science fiction short story written by Hal Draper in 1961. It first appeared in the December 1961 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Plot

The plot is about an anthropologist from an alien civilization who, several million years in the future, investigates the remains of our civilization. It turns out that the destruction of humanity was due to information saturation, due to the inability to properly catalog and retrieve knowledge.

The title of the short story is due to the fact that all redundancy has been removed from our language in order to reduce the volume of information. Finally the sum of all human knowledge (which was almost infinite) was stored in a drawer-sized package by subatomic processes. In any case, to access this information it was necessary to use complicated indexes, bibliographies, etc., which soon came to exceed the amount of knowledge itself.

The use of indexes grows exponentially, comprising a pseudo-city, then a pseudo-planet, and finally a pseudo-galaxy to store information. At that point, a circular reference case is found and the civilization needs to find the first drawer to find the error. But, this one has been lost in the pseudo-galaxy, and soon our entire civilization is falling apart while trying to locate it.

The anthropologist realizes that his own civilization is, in fact, heading toward the same outcome.