CZM Book Club: "The Nine Billion Names of God" by Arthur C. Clarke

adaptation of a story that mostly came from Kubrick. Okay, So a lot of like the more like Nietzschean or like existential stuff in two thousand and one mostly comes from Kubrick. Okay, And if you read any of the sequels to two thousand and one, you can very clearly see what type of stuff came from Arthur C. Clark. It's just an interesting experiment.

don't know if I renewed my membership. I believe in the SFWA and have been a member in the past, and will probably be a member now that I've shamed myself into remembering to send in my you know, yearly fee or whatever.

More broadly, most magazines want to be professional magazines, and so they therefore have to pay the current professional rate, which I don't remember what is, because I haven't submitted short fiction to magazines in a while. My little brag about how they come to me. No, I've just been busy writing other stuff.

How there's a couple other stories from there. There's another one who a guy invents a thing where he doesn't have to sleep, and then he a lot of stuff that Futurama has ripped off of comes from this book.

a self conscious way. I want to point that out, and I will chalk that up to the style at the time. But you don't need to.

establishment had much use for such a machine. Could you explain just what you intend to do with it, gladly, replied the Lama, readjusting his silk robes and carefully putting away the slide rule he had been using for currency conversions. Your Mark five computer can carry out any routine mathematical operation involving up to ten digits. However, for our work, we are interested in letters, not numbers. As we wish you to modify the output circuits, the machine will be

printing words, not columns of figures. I don't quite understand. This is a project on which we have been working for the last three centuries since the Lamissary was founded. In fact, it is somewhat alien to your way of thought, so I hope you will listen with an open mind while I explain it naturally well. In order to run this podcast, we need to interject classic and important stories with advertisements for ads and services, said Margaret. The host,

here's the mess, and we're back. It is really quite simple. We have been compiling a list which shall contain all the possible names of God. I beg your pardon. We have reason to believe, continued the Lama in imperturbably. That's totally how you pronounced that that all such names can be written with not more than nine letters in an alphabet we have devised, and you have been doing this for three centuries. Yes, we expected it would take us

about fifteen thousand years to complete the task. Oh, doctor Wagner looked a little dazed. Now, I see why you wanted to hire one of our machines. But exactly what is the purpose of this project? Lama hesitated for a fraction of a second, and Wagner wondered if he had offended him. If so, there was no trace of annoyance in the reply. Call it ritual if you like, but it's a fundamental part of our belief. All the many names of the Supreme Being God, Jehovah, Allah, and so

on are only man made labels. There is a philosophical problem with some difficult to hear, which I do not propose to discuss. But somewhere among all the possible combinations of letters that can occur are what one may call the real names of God. By systematic permutation of letters. We have been trying to list them all. I see, so you've been starting at A and working to zzzzzzz exactly.

Though we use a special alphabet of our own. Modifying the electromatic typewriters to deal with this is of course trivial. A rather more interesting problem is that of devising suitable circuits to eliminate ridiculous combinations. For example, no oh letter must occur more than three times in succession three. Surely you mean two three is correct. I'm afraid it would take too long to explain why, even if you understood

our language. I'm sure it would, said Wagner hastily. Go on. Luckily, it will be a simple matter to adapt your automatic sequence computer for this work, since once it has been programmed properly, it will permute each letter in turn and print the result. What would have taken us fifteen thousand years, it will be able to do in a hundred days. Doctor Wagner was scarcely conscious of the faint sounds from

the Manhattan streets far below. He was in a different world, a whirl of natural, not man made mountains high up in their remote areas. These monks had been patiently at work, generation after generation, compiling their lists of meaningless words. Was there any limits to the follies of mankind? Still? He must give no hint to his inner thoughts. The customer was always right. There's no doubt, replied the doctor, that we can modify the mark five to print lists of

this nature. I'm much more worried about the problem of installation and maintenance. Getting out to Tibet in these days is not going to be easy. We can arrange that the components are small enough to travel by air. That is one reason why we chose your machine. If you can get them to India, we will provide transport from there. And you want to hire two of our engineers, Yes, for the three months that the project should occupy. I've no doubt that personnel can manage that. Doctor Wagner scribbled

a note on his desk pad. There are just two other points. Before he could finish the sentence, the lama had produced a small slip of paper. This is my certified credit balance at the Asiatic Bank. Thank you. It appears to be adequate. The second matter is so trivial that I hesitate to mention it. But it's surprising how often the obvious gets overlooked. What source of electrical energy do you have? You a diesel generator providing fifty kilowotts

at one hundred and ten volts. It was installed about five years ago and is quite reliable. It's made life at the lamissary much more comfortable. But of course it was really installed to provide power for the motors driving the prayer wheels. Of course, echoed doctor Wagner. I should have thought of that. The view from the parapet was verticenuous,

but in time, one gets used to anything. After three months, George Hanley was not impressed by the two thousand foot swoop into the Abyss or the remote checkerboard of fields in the valley below. He was leaning against the wind smooth stones and staring morosely at the distant mountains whose names he had never bothered to discover. This thought, George was the craziest thing that had ever happened to him. Project Shangri La, some went back at the labs had

christened it. For weeks now the mark five had been churning out acres of sheets covered with gibberish patiently inexorably. The computer had been re arranging letters in all their possible combinations, exhausting each clasp before going on to the next. As the sheets had emerged from the electromatic typewriters, the monks had carefully cut them up and pasted them into

enormous books. In another week, Heaven be praised, they would have finished just what obscure calculations had convinced the monks that they needn't bother to go on to words of ten, twenty or one hundred letters. George didn't know. One of his recurring nightmares was that there would be some change of plan and that the hi Lama, whom they naturally called Sam Jaffe, although he didn't look a bit like him.

Reader's note, I had to look that up. That's an actor who people would have recognized in the fifties, would suddenly announced that the project would be extended to approximately eighty twenty sixty. They were quite capable of it. George heard the heavy wooden door slam in the wind as Chuck came out onto the parapet beside him. As usual, Chuck was smoking one of the cigars that made him so popular with the monks, who it seemed, were quite willing to embrace all the minor and most of them

the major pleasures of life. That was one thing in their favor. They might be crazy, but they weren't blue noses those frequent trips they took down to the village, for instance. Listen, George said Chuck urgently, I've learned something that means trouble. What's wrong? Isn't the machine behaving? That was the worst contingency George could imagine. It might delay his return, and nothing could be more horrible the way he felt. Now, even the sight of a TV commercial

would seem like manna from heaven. At least it would be some link with home. And who would I be to not take that opportunity to offer you this the modern version of the TV commercial, the podcast commercial, and we're back. No, oh, it's nothing like that. Chuck settled himself on the parapet, which was unusual because normally he was scared of the drop. I've just found what all this is about? What do you mean? I thought we knew, sure, we know what the monks are trying to do. But

we didn't know why. It's the craziest thing. Tell me something new, growled George. But old Sam's come clean with me. You know the way he drops in every afternoon just to watch the sheet rolls out. Well, this time he seemed rather excited, or at least as near as he'll ever get to it. When I told him that we were on the last cycle, he asked me, in that cute English accent of his, if i'd ever wondered what they were trying to do. I said sure, and he

told me, go on, I'll buy it. Well, they believe that when they've listed all his names and they reckon they're 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 completed, God steps in and

simply winds things up. Bingo, Oh, I get it. When we finish our job, it'll be the end of the world. Chuck gave a nervous little laugh. That's just what I said to Sam, and do you know what happened? He looked at me in a very queer way, like I'd been stupid in class, and said, it's nothing as trivial as that. George thought this over for a moment. That's what I call taking the wide view, he said, presently, But what do you suppose we should do about it?

I don't see it makes the slightest difference to us. After all, we already knew they were crazy. Yes, but don't you see what may happen when the list's complete and the last Trump doesn't blow or whatever it is they expect, We may get the blame. It's our machine they've been using. I don't like the situation one little bit, I see, said George slowly. You've got a point there.

But this sort of thing's happened before, you know. When I was a kid down in Louisiana, we had a crackpot preacher who once said the world was going to end next Sunday. Hundreds of people believed him, even sold their homes. Yet when nothing happened, they didn't turn nasty as you'd expect. They just decided that he'd made a mistake in his calculations and went right on believing. I guess some of them still do well. This isn't Louisiana, in case you hadn't noticed, there are just two of

us and hundreds of these monks. I like them, and I'll be sorry for old Sam when his life work backfires on him. But all the same, I wish I was somewhere else. I've been wishing that for weeks. But there's nothing we can do until the contract's finished and the transport arrives to fly us out. Of course, said Chuck thoughtfully. We could always try a bit of sabotage, like how we could That would make things worse, not

the way I meant look at it. Like this, the machine will finish its run four days from now on the present twenty four hours a day basis. The transport calls in in a week. Okay, then all we need to do is find something that needs replacing during one of the overhaul periods, something that'll hold up the work for a couple of days. We'll fix it, of course, but not too quickly. If we time matters properly, we can be down at the airfield when the last name

pops out of the register. They won't be able to catch us. Then I don't like it, said George. It will be the first time I ever walked out on a job. Besides, it would make them suspicious. No, I'll sit tight and see what comes. I still don't like it, he said seven days later, as the tough little mountain ponies carried them down the winding road. And don't you

think I'm running away, because I'm afraid. I'm just sorry for those poor old guys up there, and I don't want to be around when they find out what suckers they've been. Wonder how Sam will take it. It's funny, replied Chuck. But when I said goodbye, I got the idea that he knew we were walking out on him, and that he didn't care because he knew the machine was running smoothly and that the job would soon be finished. After that, well, of course, for him, there just isn't

any after that. George turned in his saddle and stared back up the mountain road. This was the last place from which one could get a clear view of the lamissary. The squat angular buildings were silhouetted against the after glow of the sunset. Here and there lights gleamed like portholes in the side of an ocean liner electric lights, of course, sharing the same circuit as the Mark five. How much

longer would they share, it, wondered George. Would the monks smash up the computer and their rage and disappointment, or would they just sit down quietly and begin their calculations all over again. He knew exactly what was happening up on the mountain at this very moment. The High Lama and his assistants would be sitting in their silk robes, inspecting the sheets as the junior monks carried them away from the typewriters and pasted them into their great volumes.

No one would be saying anything. The only sound would be the incessant patter the never ending rain storm of the keys hitting the paper. For the Mark five itself was utterly silent as it flashed through its thousands of calculations. A second three months of this, thought George, was enough to start anyone climbing up the wall. There she is, called, Chuck, pointing down into the valley. Ain't she beautiful? She certainly was, thought George. The battered old Dasey three lay at the

end of the runway like a tiny silver cross. In two hours she would be bearing them away to freedom insanity. It was a thought worth savoring, Like a final liqueur. George let it roll around in his mind as the pony trudged patiently down the slope. The swift night of the high Himalayas was now almost upon them. Fortunately, the road was very good, as roads went in that region, and they were both carrying torches. There was not the slightest danger, only a certain discomfort from the bitter cold.

The sky overhead was perfectly clear and a blaze with familiar, friendly stars. At least there would be no risk, thought George of the pilot being unable to take off because of weather conditions. That had been his only remaining worry. He began to sing, but gave it up after a while. This vast arena of mountains gleaming like whitely hooded ghosts on every side did not encourage such ebuliance. Presently, George glanced at his watch. Should be there in an hour,

he called back over his shoulder to Chuck. Then he added, in an afterthought, wonder if the computers finished its run. It was due about now. Chuck didn't reply, so George swung round in his saddle. He could just see Chuck's face. A white oval turned toward the sky, look whispered Chuck, and George lifted his eyes to heaven. There is always a last time for everything. Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out. That's the story. Apparently at some

point the Dali Lama wrote Arthur C. Clark instead. I read your story and found it very amusing, So that's fun. Yeah, it got a pass from the people it was weirdly appropriating. I guess. Yeah, it's overall self contained. But I have a few thoughts about it. One that I didn't get into this last reading. It's really funny to me that the last trump is used instead of the last trumpet, like as the way of signaling the end of the world.

And apparently that would be a way that you would have said that in the fifties, and I just find that very amusing based on the current state of the political world or whatever.

to the inputs and things like that. It's gone on to be like I don't have it in front of me, but like Ada's objection or something was coined by the gay British man who defeated the Nazis the computer guy who invented computing.

just like what if all possible images are made? And so it's kind of like I think, I don't know if I really think this, but I've been thinking about it. It's like running us towards the death of culture because everything will have been like there's sort of an infinite possibility of combinations of words that there's an infinite creative output that could be made. But AI is like trying to run through them as fast as possible. And we've been kind of even before AI kind of doing that

as like culture speeds up. I don't know where I'm going with that, but I just want to run that past. As relates to this story.

a silver cross. They refer to the plane as a silver cross, and we assume we know better, but we don't.

two sister genres, but they're not always the same thing. Yeah, and Twin Peaks likes to kind of mix between the two, and for the original series probably more often ends up being in like P and W New Weird as opposed to some of the American Gothics sensibilities it kind of

grows into. There's certainly some science fiction elements similar to kind of how this story kind of blends that sort of like orientalism with science fiction elements right well, And actually this also ties in a lot if we're talking about Arthur C. Clark in two thousand and one, there's also a lot of carryover from two thousand and one into

Twin Peaks as well. A lot of that does come from Kubrick, because Kubrick and Lynch were contemporaries, but some that certainly would also stem from Arthur C. Clark's stuff. But yeah, the ending of season two is very similar in some ways to one part of the ending of two thousand and one. There's a part that's very similar to the Stargate sequence. There's a decent amount of crossover.

You can definitely read in some Arthur C. Clark undertones across some of the more cosmic elements of Twin Peaks.

being like outside of his traditional wheelhouse. So that was why, you know, at the beginning, you were like, oh, Arthur C. Clark wrote the science e boring bits of two thousand works, and Kubrick did the like, but what if it's like drugs and space part And that's what makes this sort of interesting to me is a kind of a gate into that there is like a certain level where if you write about space and it's not fundamentally weird, you're

doing it wrong. Yeah, totally, and like it's kind of part of the betrayal of Star Wars and shit, absolutely I like Star Wars, but I mean space.

terms of how they view science fiction. But no, it has to have an element of outsideness, and that's something I think this story gets to really well, especially you have on almost like a caricter of Arthur C. Clark within the scientists being like, Oh, they're gonna be so bad with this mystical mumbo jumbo computer stuff doesn't end up working, and then it still does, so there's that little fun part and then it kind of introduces that

element of outsideness, which otherwise I think the story would not be good at all if it just if.

life on earth that we can't look at. You know, if like you were just described the sun being like, oh, there's this thing in the sky that you can't make eye contact with or you'll it'll fuck you up.

out on Cool People Did Cool Stuff. I talk about history and I also have a book that will be going into pre order soon. It is my first novel. I've been as mentioned earlier, I've written an awful lot of novellas, including very long novellas that whatever all categories or social categorization. I have decided that this is my first novel in the country. It goes as a long novella.

And this book is called The Sapling Cage and it comes out on September twenty fourth from the Feminist Press and you can check it out closer to them if you pre order it. See y'all next week, Alan Turing.