Encyclopaedia Britannica

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is Smith’s first great map of human knowledge, but not yet a guide to understanding it. At Jubal Harshaw’s home he devours its pages with extraordinary speed, treating what he reads as material to be stored and contemplated later. The contrast between his near-total recall and his difficulty grasping human concepts makes the reference work an instrument of both education and estrangement: it can supply definitions, but not the conceptual world that makes those definitions intelligible.

Reading as a New Practice

Jubal tells Smith that learning to read will help him grok the strange and beautiful place in which he has arrived. Smith takes the advice literally and spends a full day learning to read quickly, with Jill pointing to words and pronouncing them. The lesson costs him a day at the swimming pool, a sacrifice made striking because swimming has become an almost religious ecstasy for him. Since he is not allowed to swim at night, he turns instead to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, reading through it with such speed that Jubal has to caution him against taking in too much at one sitting.

The book is not his only reading. Smith samples Jubal’s medicine and law libraries, and later reports that he has read three more volumes of the encyclopedia, from entries beginning with Mary through Ozon, then P through Planti. He has also read Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Casanova’s memoirs in Arthur Machen’s translation, and Francis Weilman’s The Art of Cross-Examination. When Jubal asks whether he has grokked these works, Smith answers that he does not know. The list demonstrates the astonishing reach of his new literacy, while his uncertainty marks the distinction he is still trying to learn: reading a book, remembering it, and understanding it are not the same achievement.

Knowledge Without a Shared Conceptual Map

Smith’s use of the encyclopedia is shaped by his Martian upbringing. He remembers the words he reads and files the information for future contemplation, but he does not assume that remembering amounts to comprehension. In conversation about a televised Fosterite service, he can recall what he has read about religion and related subjects, yet he has not grokked the service as religious. He can even recite all nine dictionary definitions of religion without possessing a concept that connects them to the event before him.

The obstacle is not simply unfamiliar vocabulary. Smith still thinks in Martian, and his language does not separate the human categories of religion, philosophy, and science in the way English does. To him, such matters belong together as learnings from the Old Ones. In that conceptual framework, human authors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica appear to be much like the human Old Ones: authoritative sources whose knowledge is passed along for the benefit of those who remain embodied. The encyclopedia’s breadth therefore cannot, by itself, teach him how human beings divide and interpret the world. Its facts reach him more readily than the distinctions that organize them.

Memory, Authority, and Misreading

The encyclopedia’s authority is most visible in Smith’s initial assumptions about its origin. After encountering a weather forecast in a television broadcast, he supposes that it is a message from human Old Ones being circulated among people still in bodies. Further inquiry shows that he makes a similar assumption about the authors of the encyclopedia. The mistake is revealing rather than careless: Smith fits unfamiliar human practices into a Martian framework in which reliable knowledge comes from the Old Ones, whom he understands as omniscient and infallible within his experience.

Jubal’s questioning brings the difference between recall and interpretation into view. Smith can reproduce what he has seen and read with extraordinary accuracy, even recalling every word and action in a stereovision program, including its commercials. Yet his store of information does not automatically let him recognize what a human institution means. The reference book functions in this process as an archive to be revisited, not a complete key to human life. Smith’s willingness to admit uncertainty—he has read, but does not know whether he has grokked—keeps the gap visible rather than disguising it with fluent recitation.

Limits and Narrative Significance

As Smith’s literacy develops, the Encyclopaedia Britannica recurs as a measure of both his capacity and his unfinished understanding. He can move rapidly through its volumes and retain material that overwhelms his teachers’ expectations, but his reading does not erase the conceptual differences between Martian and human experience. The irony is especially sharp when definitions are available in abundance while the underlying category remains foreign: nine verbal definitions cannot make religion a separate idea in a mind whose language does not divide it from philosophy and science.

The book therefore represents more than a store of facts. It gives Smith access to human knowledge while exposing the assumptions by which knowledge is made legible: categories, institutions, and shared habits of interpretation that an encyclopedia can describe but cannot instantly impart. His reading begins a long process of learning to inhabit those human meanings. Its first lesson is not that every question has been answered, but that accurate words and abundant information may still leave understanding waiting to happen.