Transwarp Tuesday! The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke

The End is Nigh…

 

Arthur C Clarke’s 1953 story The Nine Billion Names of God is considered to be a classic. Although it appeared on the scene before either of the big sci-fi awards, the Hugo and the Nebula, it was awarded a retrospective Hugo in 2004. So it seems like a good choice for this week’s…

TRANSWARP TUESDAY!

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Arthur C Clarke

The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke

 

Dr. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. The customer was always right….

A computer company is approached by a Tibetan lama with a strange request. The monks want a computer that will enable them to print out all the possible permutations of God’s names. They have decided on an alphabet of nine characters and expected to spend fifteen thousand years identifying all nine billion possibilities manually, but with the advent of computers they expect that the work can now be done in 100 days. Though the head of the computer company thinks they’re crackpots, he takes their money and agrees.

As part of the deal, two technicians travel with the machine to Tibet to oversee the project. At first all goes well – the machine churns out lists of names and the monks rush to cut the pages up and paste each name individually in books. But a week before the project is due to be completed, the lama explains the purpose of it all to one of the technicians…

“Well, they believe that when they have listed all His names — and they reckon that there are about nine billion of them — God’s purpose will be achieved. The human race will have finished what it was created to do, and there won’t be any point in carrying on. Indeed, the very idea is something like blasphemy.”
“Then what do they expect us to do? Commit suicide?”
“There’s no need for that. When the list’s completed, God steps in and simply winds things up… bingo!”

The technicians don’t believe this, of course, but they fear that when things don’t go as expected the monks may blame the computer – and them. So they decide to escape from the monastery before the project is over…

This is a very neat little take on the science v religion debate, or perhaps more logic v mysticism. It’s well written and amusing, with a nicely quirky ending, and I’m reasonably confident that the spiritual aspects are not meant to be taken too seriously. It’s interesting to see how basic computers were back in the ‘50s – not much more powerful than a pocket calculator really – and yet how they were considered such an amazing invention with the power to radically alter the course of history. If the story has a message, I’d say it’s more about this aspect – a humorous warning that we need to show caution in how we allow technology to be used. While it’s enjoyable and thought-provoking enough to have a bit of substance, I’m not convinced it’s one of the greatest stories I’ve read, and I suspect the retrospective Hugo it won was probably more of a recognition of Clarke’s overall reputation. However it is certainly interesting and fun, and will encourage me to read more of Arthur C Clarke’s work.

The story is available online if you’d like to read it. Click here!

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