Tag: Tomes & Talismans

In reference to my final analysis of Tomes and Talismans:
I have just now remembered the Economics-based educational series from about the same period. The one I mentioned not remembering aside from the fact that I didn’t like it. It was called — I swear I am not making this up — “Econ and Me”. It involved some kids and their magical imaginary friend Econ, who taught them about economics. And the theme song buggers the imagination (I realize that the expression is “beggars the imagination”. You haven’t heard this theme song. It is running through my head right now, sodomizing my corpus callosum). The refrain went something like “Econ! Let me tell ya ’bout Econ! Econ! And Me!”
This show was apparently so worthless that even YouTube has the good taste not to contain copies of it.
Which is a good thing, because I’d probably be strangely compelled to watch and recap it.

The really remarkable thing about Tomes and Talismans is that, aside from the stilted dialogue, this show isn’t really all that different from my memories of pretty much all science fiction of the period. Cheaply made, exposition heavy, absolutely certain that the future was going to consist of people in brightly colored polyester fighting people in filthy rags.
Abacus escapes the sewers just in time to hold up the amulet, which reflects the Wiper stun gun rays back at them. They collect a dropped gun and head for the library.
Now, I want to point out that the previous episode was about maps. They showed us a map, and indicated on it where Dad was, where the library was, and where the base was. Dad was not between the two. He was in the opposite direction.
Back at base, Athos and Variant sort out what Mythology is all about. This has got to be a tough concept for them, since fiction is a new concept for Users, and Mythology is, according to this show, a sort of mixture of fact and fiction, being true stories which had been passed down over the years having pieces forgotten or invented. They decide to try skimming.
Colonel Hogan (Hogaaaan!) and Abacus make it back to the library, where he and Bookheart share a “I would like to reindex your card catalog,” look with each other, but then quickly regroup over the MacGuffin. Here, Bookheart teaches Athos to scan, rather than skim, to find a specific topic. They talk quite a lot about the importance of scanning, looking quickly for specific keywords. This turns out to be a wasted effort, since they’re scanning for the keyword “battle” which is the first chapter of the book.
Bookheart next gets to explain notetaking, another topic the Users have no knowledge of. The basic gist here is that while the Users are intelligent, even obsessive over fact-collection, they come from a culture that uses computers and databases, and therefore have no cultural understanding of the need to organize information for sequential access.
Of course, the best thing about this is that Tomes and Talismans neatly destroys its own point. In just twenty short years, real life has taught us that the Users have it right: their system won. Computers, random access of data, they’ve basically obsoleted most of these library skills. As it turned out, library skills aren’t valuable in and of themselves, they’re useful as a way to overcome the fact that pressed dead tree is a terrible way to store information for easy access. This is basically what I said about the demise of newspapers. There’s nothing inherently good about traditional print media (It still edges out computer screens in terms of suitability for reading large amounts of text, but that’s a limitation of display technology, not some kind of universal inherent good about ink-in-tree-carcass), and it basically takes The destruction of human civilization to render those library skills really relevant. While the Users back at base are starving to death, these kids are running around pulling out encyclopedias and almanacs and dictionaries and thesauruses (thesauri?). If they’d had a local mirror of Wikipedia in the library’s computer instead of a musical montage about how to use the encyclopedia, this series would be about nine episodes shorter.
I’m pretty sure that this show was made to early for it to be a reactionary fantasy, but I could totally see it as one: Think your precious computers will save you? Well you’ll regret forgetting about the Dewey Decimal System when the apocalypse comes! Frankly, if it takes the Eschaton to make traditional library science relevant again, I think my time would be better spent taking a class in how to grow my own food.
(And I say all this despite being quite fond of libraries.)
Anyway, the Wipers are getting worried, because first they saw a horse, and now the ones who got stunned are reporting that the Users are armed with a blood-red stone, and their leader, Homer Simpson Humbuckler (Humbucker?), orders the destruction of the User base.
Meanwhile, thanks to their new skill of Skimming, Scanning, and Notetaking, the library gang has discovered that Wiper legend tells of a great battle in Alpha Centauri, where a giant half-man-half-Clomatt waving a blood-red stone emerged from a cloud and scared off all the Wipers. Alpha Centauri is the Users’ home star system, so they suspect this is the ancient battle where their people somehow defeated the Wipers, via a method which modern Users don’t know, because a generation or two ago, they removed the article from their database for lack of Notability. They find a Wiper-English dictionary to look up what a “Clomatt” is, but the audience doesn’t need one, since the Wipers have been using the term to refer to horses for eight episodes now. Athos realizes that a half-man-half-horse is a centaur, and as they’re from the Alpha Centauri system, this must be the redacted chapter from their history.
Since there’s a book on holograms in the Wizard’s Reading List, Colonel Hogan (Hogaaaan!) realizes that their goal should be to create a hologram of a centaur holding a ruby, and project it on a cloud. Unfortunately, their book is a few years out of date, so the kids rush off to learn how to find information in the Periodical section, which fortunately points out an article on holographic animation from a late issue science journal.
Athos studies the Vertical File, the weird bit of the library where you stick random stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else (Seriously, does anyone know what the hell a vertical file is for?), and also finds a card catalog entry for a newspaper, so we get to learn the most useless of the library skills taught in this series: how microfilm works. This really impresses Athos.
Colonel Hogan (Hogaaan!) shaves, and awkwardly indicates to Bookheart that he would very much like her to inspect his audiovisual section, but he is cardstock-blocked by his daughter, who has found a magazine article indicating that they may be able to lure a horse to them by tossing the Colonel’s dirty laundry nearby. He takes Athos out to do this, and they happen upon the Wipers, who are preparing their final assault on the base. Which is still in the opposite direction.
Athos and the Colonel return to find Bookheart tracing a slide image of a horse (Tee hee. Slides in the future.), and Hogan (Hogaaan!) utters the best line ever: “Athos and I spitted Wipers outside while planting my underwear.” Since episode 12 is about audiovisual media, Bookheart explains that some libraries catalog those separately, but not this library. As this is the last existing library on earth, her statement is not strictly accurate. She also teaches the kids the difference between film and videotape, a useful skill in the twenty-third century.
Hogan (Hogaaan!) needs her to show him how to handle a film camera, and for once this is not a euphemism. Except that they do have a moment during which he totally wants her to handle his film camera, but the fat kid places a hold on the book he wanted to check out. The Colonel gets very annoyed at him. Abacus wanders off to look at clouds, carrying on the tradition of really stupid, reckless children in television. She finds the horse, and the Wizard appears to her, giving her another clue — a sort of terrible one that they resolve to “the secret word is Athenium (It’s Greek for “Library”)”. Bookheart has gotten snippy and irritable, because she has become aware that she hasn’t gotten any in over a century. As they prepare to make their hologram, the kids also find a camcorder, and decide to film a documentary about their adventures, in case they fail and die, in the hopes that future visitiors to the library might learn from it, and do better than they did. You know what that means: recap clip show.
On the way up a nearby mountain to project their hologram, God The Universal Being appears to them again, this time giving them a copy of the script properly cited research report on their work. They get set up, and there is nothing left to do but wait. Which they do. No one will be seated during the thrilling “waiting” sequence.
At last, they fire up the projector, and a 2-D video toaster matte shot of Hogan (Hogaaan!) moaning “Athenium” appears in the clouds. The Wipers watching the magnetic shield controls freak out and run away. letting the controls overheat and crash, and the advancing Wiper army (six drunk fat dudes) run like hell.
With the shield down, they re-establish communications with the rest of the galaxy, and announce that the Wipers are defeated, because apparently, this dozen or so drunk angry rednecks are the entirety of the force that invaded earth.
They take Grandmother Nikola Tesla back to the library, where they recap the entire series again to he over a slice of watermelon. Then, after that, they watch hilights from their documentary again. This is why you really need to have approximately the same amount of airtime as story. The plot of this episode was about four minutes long.
They sheepishly discover that “The implosion of the magnetic shield must have caused a dematerialization vortex at their headquarters,” which wither beamed the Wipers randomly to other planets, or just killed them. It’s not really clear.
At the last minute, a conference call from the Human descendants, who thank the users for getting rid of the wipers, and are therefore coming home. They are so greatful that they promise not to obliterate the Users from orbit. Bookheart says that Humans and Users have already started in on a beautiful friendship, and gives a longing look to Colonel Hogan (Hogaaan!) indicating that she’d like him to help her shelve something in the stacks…
You know, despite the fact that this series was, frankly, shit, it holds a special place in my heart for a couple of reasons. Firstly, so far as I know, it was the only Science Fiction Single-Topic Educational Series that aired in my youth — there were a lot of series in this general format, shows about reading (the seminal Canadian series “Read All About It”), and about math, and about anatomy (I think it was called “The Body Electric” and the main character worse a body stocking printed with a cutaway view of where all the organs go), and about economics (I can’t remember the show about economics very well, but I know that there was one. I didn’t like it) and about art, but unless you count Read All About It (Which was really closer to Fantasy), none of them would qualify as science fiction. And on rewatching as an adult, I’m really struck by some of the thought that went into it. There’s some things that seem strange for a kids’ show. In a thirteen part series about library science, there’s some very real and candid threat of death, the implied genocide of the Wiper race at the end, heck, the freaking Eschaton, even a hint of romance. Were the writers really cleverer than I thought? Maybe, or maybe, as someone on ifMud once pointed out, the writers are just human beings, and as such will occasionally hit on something authentically human just by virtue of the fact that we humans think like humans.
Still, “Post Apocalyptic Library Adventure.” There’s a tagline for you.
And don’t call me Shirley.

Episode six opens with dad on the run from the Wipers. They’re just about to shoot him with their futuristic hair driers and caulk guns, but freak the hell out and run away. Back at the library, Athos looks up the encyclopedia in the computer, which is very meta. He is treated to a musical montage about all the things you can look up in the encyclopedia. Now, encyclopedia is an awkward word to fit into the meter of a song. As far as I know, Jiminy Cricket is the only person to ever successfully do it. Also, she radically mispronounces “Zaire” (She says “Zar”) and Emile Zola. Athos looks horrified.
Back at base, one of the Users has prepared a powerpoint slide showing how their food supply (measured in “Quark pods”) decreases linearly over time (in “lunens”) He is praised for conveying the information clearly, and is given the honor of being the first one they eat after their inevitable turn to cannibalism.
Abacus has been reading The Story of the Amulet, since it’s an engaging story even though her base is under seige. Athos finds this a waste of time as much as I do, and draws a chart to show her how many pages of book they need to get through in order to read all the books on the wizard’s reading list. It seems that Users have a knack for charts, even though they then explain what a chart is, indicating that this too is a novel concept for them.
Dad, whose name is Colonel Hogan (Hogaaaaan!) calls in. By which I mean, he transmits, “Abacus, this is your father, Colonel Hogan.” Now, I thought that this was a silly thing to say, but then, we’ve only met their father and grandmother, and I haven’t seen any other adult female Users, so maybe they’ve got two daddies. He’s hungry, so Miss Bookheart directs him to smassh a small nearby hard-shelled object, which she thinks is a nut. It turns out to be a watermellon, because Colonel Hogan (Hogaaaaaan!) is terrible at describing things. He finds it delicious, at which point my beloved Leah, who has never seen an episode of Power Rangers SPD proves that she’s spent too much time around me, by adding, “And buttery!”
As dad hides from the Wipers, Athos forgets that he’s got a magical headband that lets him define any word, and has to be taught about the dictionary. From this, he deciphers the wizard’s message (‘To elide the buckler, these tomes offer succor’) as “To destroy the shield, these books offer help,” and from this, he draws the conclusion “This means that these books offer help to destroy the shield!” Really, Bookheart ought to have shown him the thesaurus.
I spoke too soon — Bookheart has the same idea, and whips out a thesaurus to translate the rest of the clues into something less florid.
Back at base, there is great concern over the food supply, because they haven’t eaten in minutes. Grandma Nikola Tesla wanders through the hall of street signs that they for some reason have, then sits down and reads The Macguffin, which contains the legend of how the Users defeated the Wipers in their prehistory. She eventually remembers that she’s got a ruby talisman necklace which I’m guessing is an old family heirloom. This is awesome, because the kids have just discovered, from the wizard’s summer reading list, that they need a ruby to use as an amulet to (this part they have not figured out yet), to something to do with horses and defeating the Wipers, and breaking the magnetic shield.
The next clue they try to address involves lasers, and since lasers are a sciency thing, it’s time to learn about other kinds of reference books, such as the science encyclopedia and science dictionary.
Meanwhile, Athos turns gaygayer and decides to put on a one-man-Shakespeare review. He’s looking to make sense of “the king’s familiar price.” I’m a bit ashamed to discover that I didn’t work this out until I was repeating it to Leah, several episodes after the clue was introduced. It’s pretty obvious. What are Wipers deathly afraid of?
While Athos learns about Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, Variant and Fat Kid learn about Mythology, and Abacus has a heartfelt conversation with her father in comically stilted language. They’ve now solved this much of the puzzle: 1. A horse (my kingdom for a); 2. A laser; 3. A ruby; 4. A cloud. (They sort of glossed over that one)
I remember being very proud of myself when I sorted out what they had to do.
Episode 9 beings with Abacus and Bookheart reading a book on sewers, but when she’s left alone, she secretly pulls out a notepad and starts doodling. Athos needs to have a short lesson in maps, and Bookheart obliges. They direct Colonel Hogan (Hogaaaan!) to follow the railroad tracks. Because railroads are not library-related, the users do not need an explanation of what one is. For comic relief, the Wipers use a map too, only by “map”, they mean “monopoly board”.
Abacus needs an almanac, urgently. What is it? It’s a book of up-to-date facts giving the latest information for each year, but that’s not important now. She needs it because she’s theorized that the wizard’s clue is leading them to the possibility of using the sewer system to get back to their base and retrieve the Macguffin of Wipers On Earth Volume Three. Surely, you say, that’s not in an almanac. True, but if the population increased by more than ten percent in the years after the publication of the definitive book on local sewers, they’d have installed a new line which connects the sections of town between the library and the base. And don’t call me Shirley.
Because VHS tapes age poorly, we’re then treated to five minutes of dark blurs while either Abacus travels via the sewer to the User base, or Colonel Hogan (Hogaaan!)and the Wipers wander around in the dark.
Turns out that it was the former; Abacus pops up in the base, half-dead from her sewer crawl. After a lengthy recap, she asks to take back the copy of the Macguffin. Grandma Nikola Tesla immediately hands over the book, and throws in her ruby amulet, and sends her granddaughter to crawl back through miles of decaying sewers, because of a wizard. The Users are basically dumbasses.
Dad gets caught by the Wipers just as the century-old sewer system, which Bookheart mentions was built to be “cheaper to replace than to maintain” colapses on Abacus…

Have you noticed that there’s a bit of a trend in the media I like to favor stories about the end of civilization? The Tribe; Cloverfield; Zombie movies; Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future; pPower Rangers RPM… Forget I said that last one.
It’s enough of a pattern, in fact, that I’ve created the new category “Eschatology” to group together all my postings on the subject. It’s a term I like because it’s comparatively less common, outside ecumenical contexts, than “apocalypse” or “armageddon” (Or, as zombie fans would call them, the “Zompocalypse” or “Zombiegeddon”. I believe I have never heard anyone use the term “Zombeschaton”.). Also, I like to pretend that I get the words “Eschatological” and “Scatological” confused, but that shit ain’t the end of the world.
After a few years trying to find this show, most of which were spent trying to remember what it was called, I discovered a bit of an oddball in the Eschatological family. It’s a 13-episode 1985 educational series produced by Mississippi Public Broadcasting for the purpose of teaching basic library skills to young people. I am not making this up.
The series, which I eventually discovered is called Tomes and Talismans, is set in the twenty-third century, though the only evidence of this you will see in the show is that the costume department seems to have been propertied as a result of a traveling Doctor Who exhibit losing its wardrobe.
In the twenty-second century, we are told, pollution and overpopulation are serious problems. Not problems which will in any way impact this series, but we wanted to remind you that it is the future. Also, Earth has been colonized (They do not say “invaded” for some reason) by a “primitive” species called “The Wipers”. Despite being a primitive species, the Wipers — Basically a combination of “generic 80s punk character from every show you’ve ever seen” and Space Rednecks (They kind of remind me of the Locos in the first episode of The Tribe, demonstrating that New Zealand is at least 20 years behind the US in Post-Eschaton Street Punk Technology) — have overrun the earth, which is lame because their “favorite pasttime” is disrupting information technology (Bachelor number two is from the Dark Star solar system, his hobbies include golf and disrupting all channels of communication and information storage). What with the pollution and overpopulation and alien invasions and all, the people of Earth collectively decide to say “Fuck it” and just move to a nicer neighborhood, organizing a mass evacuation to another planet, using their jealously guarded Video Toaster technology to beam the entire human race to another planet. It is the year 2132 and humanity has the technology to teleport itself to another star system, but not to fend off invasion by a race of drunken rednecks. Remember this, because it will become a theme.
Among the last to be evacuated are the staff of the Last Library, a vast underground repository of all of human knowledge preserved in dead tree format, approximately the size of the fourth floor of the Loyola-Notre Dame library. The staff consists of Miss Bookheart (A graduate of the Stephen Ulysses Perhero School of Thematically Appropriate Character Names) and a team of mentally handicapped associate librarians. One of them shows her the front page of today’s “World Daily News” (Sidebar: When I first saw this show, about a quarter century ago, there were lots of things which I thought were silly. An alumni of Star Trek, I thought it was silly that in the future, they’d keep all these books as hard copies instead of on a computer. What did not occur to me then is what turned out to be the silliest “future” prediction of them all: That newspapers would still exist in the twenty-second century.), helpfully reporting that Earth has been evacuated. One of her flunkies brings her a copy of “The History of Wipers On Earth Volume 1” and asks whether history books should get shelved under Fiction.
The easiest way to enjoy Tomes and Talismans is to pretend that it ws made by Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker. In that light, almost every line of dialogue becomes a form of the “We need to get this man to a hospital!” “A hospital? What is it?” joke.
This requires rather a lot of imagination.
Bookheart calmly explains that history is nonfiction — that is, fact-based, as opposed to fiction, which is invented or made up stories — and that under the Dewey Decimal System, which was invented by Melville Dewey to help find information in a library, history books are categorized in the 900s, which spans from 900 through 999.
If you found that paragraph stilted, you aren’t using your imagination hard enough, but I’ve successfully captured the feel of this show.
The sidekick asks how future generations will be able to find anything, since they won’t have been trained in the Dewey Decimal system. Miss Bookheart waves off his concern: the Dewey Decimal system was created *to* help people find things (If you did not think this actually addresses the question, we are on the same page.), and surely future generations will be able to figure it out. Miss Bookheart seems to have forgotten that she is talking to a man who is apparently trained in library sciences, and who nonetheless forgot that “history” isn’t a subdivision of “fiction”.
They namecheck “How to Eat Fried Worms” and “The Great Brain”, two of my childhood favorites, while lamenting that they will have to leave all of bookkind behind, as humanity has apparently decided that they are going to leave all their books here to be rediscovered later, rather than, y’know, taking them along to be not-un-discovered.
Most of all, Miss Bookheart will miss her dictionary, as they will not have them in the White Crystal Star System or wherever it is that they’re going, and she explains what a dictionary is. Even her assistant looks a little tired of her incessant exposition, but, hey, don’t be so snooty, dude, you’re the guy who thought history went under fiction.
Shock and horror, though, volume three of “The History of Wipers on Earth” is missing. And because it is a nonfiction book, containing many true facts, its absence from the library is a major oversight, so, stopping only to explain how the card catalog works, Miss Bookheart sets out in her bookmobile to check the crazy old hermit who was the last person to check the book out. His grandmother had apparently written some fiction novels about the Wipers. Novels about Wipers, you ask? They’re books containing made up or invented stories, products of the author’s own imagination, but that’s not important right now. What is important is that the wipers have been around at least three generations.
While she’s out for a drive, a wizard appears. Surely, you say, I am making a snarky analogy? No, I mean a literal wizard, in the form of a tall, skinny, hooded black dude with a cheap video toaster effect around him. He’s called “The Universal Being”, and he casts a slow-time whammy on her in order to preserve her for posterity.
In episode two, we discover that a hundred years have passed and Earth has been visited by a race of aliens called the “Users”. The Users are an advanced civilization, evidenced by their cleanliness, their polyester primary-color clothing, and the fact that they all speak very slowly and precisely and have trouble with concepts a normal person would find intuitive, in the way TV uses to indicate that someone is smart, but which is based on austistic spectrum disorder. Only they speak a bit slower and over-enunciate their words, the way Jim Brady does post-Hinkley.
They’ve got headbands which allow them to speak any language, only not very well, because they insist on using the term “story inventor” for “author” and such. This is the kind of society where the adults sort of mill around looking stern, while the children do all the work. The kids in question are Athos, Porthos, Aramis, Abacus, Variant, and Fat Kid (I only made up about half of their names), and they’re having a hard time with the concept of “books”, what with their not having “instant information access”, which I think is retro-future for “hyperlinks”. He demonstrates by asking their computer to define a book. It says “A stack of paper bound between two covers. Use of: A form of information storage used on earth”. But Abacus objects to the “use of” definition, since one of the two books they’ve found (the other is The MacGuffin Of Wipers On Earth Volume Three) is Cinderella, and she’s got a theory that maybe, just maybe, this story might not be an accurate treatise on the dressmaking skills of talking rodents. They look up “invented story”, and the computer explains that an invented story is a story that is made up. In a moment of insight, the writers will later have Athos note that knowing the definition of a word (the ability of their magical translators) does not per se lead to understanding its use.
The director’s nephew Pixel shows up and gives them a “Bookmobile Stops Here” sign he found, then leaves. After discussing the possibility of mobile books, they decide to look it up, and it occurs to them that if they go and find a bookmobile, they might find some books, and that would flesh out their database. They do stop to make fun of the Fat Kid first, though, proving that the writers’ desire to be cruel to fat people overrides even their need to make the kids all act like aspies.
They promptly find the bookmobile, but not before Athos drops his gameboy. Finding the sleeping Miss Bookheart inside, they make a big production out of how they use the word “ceased” to mean “dead”, and meet the Universal Being. Which DOES NOT PHASE THEM AT ALL. Fiction befuddles them, but wizards? Old hat. He tells them that the librarian will awaken when read a passage from a certain book. Variant, the token black User, asks if he could clarify, and he does. By which I mean that he tells them that it’s going to be a *specific* book, and they will have to *find* it and *read* it. Thanks. He does go so far as to explain that it’s a book by E Nesbit, which the User kids need to keep recapping via headband technology. Working from first principals, they determine that fiction books are shelved alphabetically by the three letters on their spine, and that those letters correspond to the name of the story inventor. This is kind of cool, in that they are deducing library organization from first principle and all, but it’s also tedious, since it consists of many iterations of “User notices X”, “User theorizes X”, “User confirms X”. Note that i used X all three times here. There’s not really a deductive trail: “Look: the last name always begins with the same letters as the three letters on the spine” “Could it be that the three letters on the spine indicate the inventor of the book?” “Yes. The three letters on the spine match the beginning of the name of the inventor of the book.” This is an old rhetorical trick called “Tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you told them,” also known as “The Really Boring Method”.

The writing prompt for the Maryland Functional Writing Test, some fifteen or sixteen years ago when I took it, was typically some variant on “Tell us about your most X moment” where X was an adjective such as “scary” or “embarassing” or “proud”. The trick to passing the Maryland Functional Writing Test was that you were basically guaranteed to fail if you did not adequately address the prompt. The way you did this was that, whatever the prompt was, you made your first sentence be: “I am going to tell you about my most X moment.”. Then you basically could write whatever you wanted for three paragraphs (Though technically, the rest of the first paragraph should be paraphrases of the topic sentences of the remaining paragraphs. Then three paragraphs consisting each of a topic sentence followed by two supporting sentences), then you ended with the sentence “Now I have told you about my X moment.”
If you failed this test, you could not graduate high school.

So they track down a copy of E Nesbit’s “The Story of the Amulet”, read a bit, and Miss Bookheart awakens. At first, she’s skeptical that she’s been asleep for a hundred years, and questions everything, such as the Users’ ridiculous clothes, their ridiculous headbands, and basically, the hokeyness of the entire setup, but she believes them when Athos tells her that it’s the year 2223 — this proves that she’s been asleep for a hundred years!
She takes them back to the library, which, despite being sealed in an underground vault, is not spotless and well-maintained like the bookmobile, but filthy, and looks to have been looted. There, she explains the various parts of books, such as the copyright page, which shows that The Story of the Amulet was first published in 1979 (Except that The Story of the Amulet is a real book, and was published in 1906. Their copy is a 1984 edition, which really ought to make it a valuable antique), the table of contents, foreward, preface, glossary, and index.
Meanwhile, the Wipers, enthralled by Athos’s dropped cell phone, decide to erect a magnetic dome over the User base, trapping them. Because these crazy, violent, drunken rednecks who hate all forms of education and learning have magnetic force field technology. Episode 4 points out that this is the only thing the Wipers have ever invented. They don’t have the wheel. They don’t even have irrigation mining and roads. But they do have magnetic force fields.
Via radio, Athos tries to guide his dad to the vault — he narrowly escaped the User transmission post before its destruction. Bookheart pulls out an atlas and sends the kids off to get the card catalog. They stop to reflect on how the humans really love alphabetical ordering, and sort out what a card catalog is. But when they come back, she praises them for being as fast as her assistants back in the old days. Personally, I believe this, because her assistants were plainly mentally handicapped. After they locate a suitable book — a travel guide to the area where dad is lost — she sends them back to find the author and title cards, because the call number has been smudged on the subject card. Since there isn’t time to ask her what title and author cards are, they reason them out from first principles, taking about ten times as long as just asking.
Dad, trained only in being a Doctor Who companion, immediately twists his ankle, so they have to guide him to a horse farm for refuge, since he doesn’t have any food or supplies. As the kids don’t know what a horse is, she has them look it up, because time is of the essence. Now, I haven’t seen this show in twenty years at least, and I could not even consistently recall the title until a few months ago, but I do remember that Anton Chekov has just hung his gun on the wall.
Bookheart recalls that the Wipers didn’t like horses for some reason, and suggests that Abacus look up Wiper Superstition in the card catalog to find out why. Unfortunately, the only book in the entire library-of-all-human-knowledge with information on the subject is (Duh-Dun-DUNNNNNN) The MacGuffin Of Wipers On Earth Volume 3
In episode 5, The Magical Negro The Universal Being appears to Dad and gives him a scroll. The scroll explains that the salvation of the world rests in the system which divides all things into ten. Bookheart immediately decides this means the Dewey Decimal System. Because everything must be about her and her stupid library. The scroll also gives a list of call numbers with cryptic crossword clues.
Dad gets the idea behind the Dewey Decimal system and thinks it’s a great idea. He does not think much about the fact that he’s lost in the woods with a hurt foot and no food.
Users have a thought-frequency-thingy which lets them memorize numbers autonomically (I’m increasingly surprised by how well the writers thought some of this stuff through. Not the dialogue or anything, but they do manage to be fairly consistent in thinking through the impilciations of how things work: this dead-tree library is the repository of all human knowledge because the Wipers have destroyed everything more advanced; Users consider both alphabetical and numerical organization strange because they don’t need to organize things, having, essentially, a neurological O(1) search capability), which means that they don’t actually need to learn the logic behind the Dewey system, but Bookheart has a pathological need to teach people the Dewey Decimal system, so she teaches them anyway.
They turn up a book on lasers, a book on holography, the complete works of Shakespeare, the MacGuffin, a book on mythology, a book about gemstones, and the encyclopedia. What does it all mean? Find out next time on…
Well, anyway. The entire series is on YouTube. For example: