Quote Origin: I Had Exactly Four Seconds To Hot Up the Disintegrator, and Google Had Told Me It Wasn’t Enough

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Raymond Chandler? Barry N. Malzberg? Vlad
Savov? Apocryphal?

A science fictional device of unknown purpose

Question for Quote Investigator: Apparently, sometime during the 1950s a popular writer of detective fiction crafted a short passage parodying science fiction. Within the passage the word “Google” appeared long before the company Google existed. The passage displayed remarkable prescience. The word “Google” referred to an entity that provided information. Would you please explore this topic and provide a citation?

Reply from Quote Investigator: The writer Raymond Chandler is best known as the creator of the hardboiled detective character Philip Marlowe. In 1953 Chandler sent a letter to a friend which included a jargon-filled passage parodying science fiction writing. Boldface added to excerpts by QI:1

Did you ever read what they call Science Fiction. It’s a scream. It is written like this: “I checked out with K 19 on Aldabaran III, and stepped out through the crummalite hatch on my 22 Model Sirus Hardtop. I cocked the timejector in secondary and waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels.”

The final sentence of Chandler’s passage included the word “Google”:2

“The sudden brightness swung me around and the Fourth Moon had already risen. I had exactly four seconds to hot up the disintegrator and Google had told me it wasn’t enough. He was right.”

They pay brisk money for this crap?

Chandler used the pronoun “he” when referring back to “Google”; hence, the character “Google” may have been a male human, a male alien, or a personified computing device.

Chandler played cricket when he was young, and he may have been influenced by the term “google” which is applied to balls which break or swerve. Alternatively, Chandler may have been influenced by the comic strip character Barney Google or by the term “Googol” which refers to the enormous number 10100 which can be written as 1 followed by one hundred zeroes.

Below are additional selected citations in chronological order.

In 1990 the science fiction anthology “Universe 1” included a story by Barry N. Malzberg which began with a reprint of Chandler’s letter. Malzberg’s goal was to construct an entertaining story which included every phrase of Chandler’s mocking prose.3 Here is an excerpt from Malzberg’s tale:4

I waded through the bright blue manda grass toward the beckoning Bryll, feeling the pull of the mud as I tried to clamber away, retain balance. This more than anything else they enjoy, taking our dignity, making us cartoons, yanking from us the solemnity of our distress and placing us on a flat and colorful map where we deal with pale, exploded forms who may or may not be representative of the Brylls themselves. We do not know if it is submission or some parody of conquest. My breath froze into pink pretzels as I squeaked.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page were the original creators of a search engine called Backrub which was renamed Google in 1997. It is natural to wonder whether they might have somehow encountered the passage written by Chandler, but there is no evidence supporting that possibility. Instead, the book “In the Plex” by journalist Steven Levy presented the following explanation for the name choice:5

In September 1997, Page and Brin renamed BackRub to something they hoped would be suitable for a business . . . Page’s dorm roommate suggested they call it “googol.” . . . “The name reflected the scale of what we were doing,” Brin explained a few years later. “It actually became a better choice of name later on, because now we have billions of pages and images and groups and documents, and hundreds of millions of searches a day.” Page misspelled the word, which was just as well since the Internet address for the correct spelling was already taken. “Google” was available. “It was easy to type and memorable,” says Page.

In 2006 “The Wit & Wisdom of Great Writers” compiled by Nick Holt included an entry which reprinted part of the Chandler’s science fiction passage while crediting Chandler.6

In 2015 “The Verge” website posted an article titled “Google was a 1953 Raymond Chandler joke” by journalist Vlad Savov. The piece reprinted the passage and included this comment:7

Chandler indulges in a brilliantly entertaining, paragraph-long parody of sci-fi writing, which hits every trope and cliché of the genre. Oh, and he namedrops Google some 45 years before Larry and Sergey registered the domain.

In conclusion, Raymond Chandler did use the term “Google” in a 1953 letter to a friend. It appeared within a comical science-fiction pastiche filled with jargon; however, the precise meaning of “Google” was unclear. “Google” was the source of information, and Chandler used the pronoun “he” when referring back to “Google”.

Acknowledgement: Great thanks to the anonymous person whose inquiry led QI to formulate this question and perform this exploration. Thanks to Rich Lowenthal who told QI about the use of the term google in cricket. Also, thanks to John Baker for his feedback.

Image Notes: A science fictional device of unknown purpose. This is a public domain image.

  1. 1981, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler by Raymond Chandler, Edited by Frank MacShane, Letter To: H. N. Swanson, Letter Date: March 14, 1953, Start Page 337, Quote Page 338, Columbia University Press, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  2. 1981, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler by Raymond Chandler, Edited by Frank MacShane, Letter To: H. N. Swanson, Letter Date: March 14, 1953, Start Page 337, Quote Page 338, Columbia University Press, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  3. 1990, Universe 1, Edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, (Comment by editors Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber on the short story “Playback” by Barry N. Malzberg), Quote Page 82, A Foundation Book: Doubleday, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  4. 1990, Universe 1, Edited by Robert Silverberg and Karen Haber, Story: Playback by Barry N. Malzberg, Start Page 82, Quote Page 86, A Foundation Book: Doubleday, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  5. 2011, In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy, Part One: The World According To Google, Quote Page 30 and 31, Simon & Schuster, New York. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  6. 2006 Copyright, The Wit & Wisdom of Great Writers, Compiled by Nick Holt, Chapter: Books Are More Than Books, Quote Page 88, House of Raven, King’s Sutton, England. (Verified with scans) ↩︎
  7. Website: The Verge, Article title: Google was a 1953 Raymond Chandler joke, Article author: Vlad Savov, Date on website: August 12, 2015, Website description: Technology news from Vox media. (Accessed theverge.com on September 14, 2024) link ↩︎