2061: Odyssey Three (Space Odyssey, #3)

by Arthur C. Clarke

And even if one wished, it was no longer possible to plan a large-scale war. The Age of Transparency had dawned in the 1990s, when enterprising news media had started to launch photographic satellites with resolutions comparable to those that the military had possessed for three decades. The Pentagon and the Kremlin were furious; but they were no match for Reuters, Associated Press, and the unsleeping, twenty-four-hours-a-day cameras of the Orbital News Service.

He surrounded it by a beautiful park, by the simple expedient of pushing the huge shopping centers underground (his newly formed Laser Excavation Corporation made a fortune in the process and set a precedent for many other cities.)

With no further clues, it might take the station Computer quite a while—perhaps as much as ten minutes—to locate the line in the whole body of English literature. But that would be cheating (not to mention expensive), and Floyd preferred to accept the intellectual challenge.

There was a long pause while each of the trio scanned his memories of that famous work. Although some critics considered her Scarlett O’Hara to be her finest role, to the general public Yva Merlin (née Evelyn Miles, when she was born in Cardiff, South Wales) was still identified with Josephine. Almost half a century ago, David Griffin’s controversial epic had delighted the French and infuriated the British—though both sides now agreed that he had occasionally allowed his artistic impulses to trifle with the historical record, notably in the spectacular final sequence of the emperor’s coronation in Westminster Abbey.

One of the benefits of Dr. Kreuger’s eminence was an unlimited computer budget: that was part of the fee he demanded from the various organizations that needed his wisdom. Though this search might be expensive, he did not have to worry about the bill. As it turned out, this was surprisingly small. He was lucky: the search came to an end after only two hours thirty-seven minutes, at the 21,456th reference.

Clarke's technology forecasts tend to be too optimistic - but Google long ago exceeded even his expectations of 2061 technology.