" From my readings, I had learned of a vast pool of human knowledge that both included books and went far beyond them in content and reach. The humans, of course, having only the faintest of intimations of quenging, use a different though related metaphor for the noosphere in which they like to dip their feet. Instead of seeing the truth of all things as a single, superluminal substance that everywhere flows like water, they conceive of it as a collection of things, and they content themselves with fashioning nets with their minds in the hope of casting them out in order to capture here a prettier pebble and there a smoother shell. Hence their name for the Oceanic wisdom that should flow among all beings: the worldwide Net. "

― David Zindell , The Idiot Gods