# Cantorbury Tales

“                    ”
~ Georg Cantor

The Cantorbury Tales are a set of 14th century stories written by Georg Cantor. They trace the progression of a single linear plot in a collection of individual short stories. However, unlike many other such anthologies of stories, one third of the stories are missing between Book I and Book III of the collection, and one third of each book has been removed from the middle of their individual tales, and so on. The amount of the story removed can be modeled mathematically as:

$\sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{2^n}{3^{n+1}} = \frac{1}{3} + \frac{2}{9} + \frac{4}{27} + \frac{8}{81} + \cdots = \frac{1}{3}\left(\frac{1}{1-\frac{2}{3}}\right) = 1.$

The result is that, because the break does not include the endpoints of the plot, the Cantorbury Tales contain no actual written words but, there being an uncountably infinite number of points remaining in the course of the plot, still has as full a plot as continuous novels.

## editEcclesiastic Controversy

Shortly after the book's publication, the Catholic Church condemned the book for heresy. There had been some misunderstanding at the Vatican that the book had claimed to be more powerful than cardinals. This was a misinterpretation as the book simply claimed to have an uncountably infinite cardinality (represented as a cardinality of $\aleph_1$). Though the church later recognized the error, the book remains banned in most Catholic countries because of public apathy toward the unbanning of "something without any real content."