There is no doubt that Jorge Luis Borges is a major literary precursor of contemporary interactive and multimedia works. It is almost commonplace to see tales such as ‘Funes el memorioso’ [Funes the Memorious], ‘La biblioteca de Babel’ [The Library of Babel], or ‘El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan’ [The Garden of the Forking Paths] as prefigurations of cyberliterature. Borges' web presence is vast – from sites dedicated to ‘Webmaster Borges’, which claim that ‘the greatest influence on the Argentine writer was a phenomenon invented after his death [namely: the Internet]’ (Wolk 1999), to the all-encompassing site of the ‘Jorge Luis Borges Center for Studies and Documentation’ hosted by the University of Iowa.

This chapter aims to demonstrate the depth and importance of Borges' legacy not only to cyberliterature but to discussions of the entire contemporary ‘posthuman’ paradigm. Even though Borges rarely speaks in any direct way of technology and of the cybercultural futures which it makes possible, his speculative fictions and other prose writings provide glimpses of posthuman conditions that are more fully portrayed by writers such as William Gibson and Philip K. Dick or in films such as The Matrix (Wachowski 1999) and Minority Report (Spielberg 2002). His work thereby can stake a claim to a foundational presence within contemporary debates on the future of the archive, memory and consciousness, on the machinic and the digital prosthetisation of the human, and on the pervasiveness of communications systems and their reshaping of the very notion of the literary.