“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. But a week before the project is due to be completed, the lama explains the purpose of it all to one of the technicians… 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. Though the head of the computer company thinks they’re crackpots, he takes their money and agrees.Īs part of the deal, two technicians travel with the machine to Tibet to oversee the project. 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. The monks want a computer that will enable them to print out all the possible permutations of God’s names.
The customer was always right….Ī computer company is approached by a Tibetan lama with a strange request. Was there any limit to the follies of mankind? Still, he must give no hint of his inner thoughts. High up in their remote aeries these monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. He was in a different world, a world of natural, not man-made, mountains. Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from the Manhattan streets far below. TRANSWARP TUESDAY! * * * * * * * Arthur C Clarke The Nine Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarkeĭr. So it seems like a good choice for this week’s… 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. Arthur C Clarke’s 1953 story The Nine Billion Names of God is considered to be a classic.
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