Today I stumbled across an unexpected convergence between two of my longtime passions: the Polish science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem (1921-2006) and mahjong!
It comes in a short story where the narrator, a newspaper editor, discovers that a newsroom computer can tell the future with unnerving accuracy for 137 seconds when disconnected from its information sources. He is about to bring a scientist from MIT to help him figure out what's going on, and has chosen someone he knows primarily through a shared pastime:
"In fact, so far we had connected on curious ground, because we both played mahjong, beyond which we hardly had any contact at all, but during a game of that kind you can find out quite a lot about a person." (p. 308)
The editors date the story to 1976.
Works Cited
Lem, Stanislaw. “One Hundred and Thirty-Seven Seconds.” The Truth and Other Stories, translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, The MIT Press, 2022. 295-322.
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