The monastery is trying to catalog what it has determined by its own calculations will be the 9 billion names of God that are possible within an alphabet they long ago devised for this project. The basic setup: a Tibetan lama in charge of a mountain monastery visits a Manhattan computer programming company hoping to contract with a couple of engineers for the three months it will take them to complete a most peculiar assignment. And if you do, you can probably skip this next plot summary section below, though sometimes summaries help reinforce key elements of what we have just read. Spoiler alert: If you want to fully immerse in the story’s twists and turns, click here now to read it fresh before returning for discussion-it requires just a few minutes. Clarke’s 1953 short story, “The Nine Billion Names of God,” remains so intriguing and fresh these many years after its publication.įor all of its plot that swirls around a potential end of the world to be engineered by a monastery full of Tibetan monks who are unwittingly assisted by American computer scientists, Clarke provides a light, occasionally even humorous touch devoid of horror, desperation and despair.īut that is not to say the story is meant as a trifle.Ĭlarke, a renowned and prolific futurist perhaps best known as the screenwriter for “2001: A Space Odyssey,” never dealt in trifles. That’s one reason why the late English-born science fiction writer Arthur C. These ‘ prophets’ tend to have one hand pointing to an exact date of doom and their other in the wallets of their followers, eager to relieve them of the burden of carrying anything into the next world. Indeed, our powerful, sometimes outright narcissistic sense of Self should probably be forgiven for wondering whether the world should even go on without us-how dare it?! Variations on the apocalypse have coursed through every form of expression since we started painting on cave walls, blinking into each dawn, cowering from storms and eclipses, imagining all-powerful gods to whom we might appeal for benevolence and mercy.Ī kind of existential angst and sometimes outright terror underlies much of the literature and other arts that have emerged over the eons to grapple with the specter of not only our own lives ending, but the final destruction of the world.

The end of the world has weighed heavily on the mind of humankind since we emerged onto the 4.5-billion-year-old planet we call home some 200,000 years ago.

The nine of billion names of god