Characters in both Dune and Foundation are working on Encyclopedia Galacticas. And in another classic series, it is precisely the failures of a hidebound, corporate, AI-ridden Encyclopedia Galactica that opens the way for a more humane alt: the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

But I am interested in the difference between trying to preserve knowledge in an archive, or embedded as tokens-in-vectorspace in an LLM, versus the older school idea of the encyclopedia. There's a reason encyclopedists feature in end-of-empire sci-fi so often...

...and to say that it's a controversial idea, at best, to think it's possible to save everything, or that doing so would be useful. And it's even more controversial when you start wondering how that would work, exactly.

(Disciple who betrayed Jesdicious, obviously)

Hah, well. Alas.

Yeah they were cool as hell.