Beyond Hesse's Glass Bead Game, Kastalia's design draws loosely on a handful of other fictional and speculative treatments of knowledge-as-structure: Borges' Library of Babel and his Garden of Forking Paths (both meditations on combinatorial, non-linear texts), and Vannevar Bush's non-fictional but visionary 'memex' -- an imagined machine for associative, trail-following reading that anticipated hypertext by decades.

None of these are literal blueprints. What they share, and what Kastalia tries to inherit from them, is the idea that a body of knowledge is better modelled as an explorable, richly cross-linked space than as a shelf of separately bound books.