9 Billion Names of God.
Apr. 8th, 2026 11:15 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackI re-read the 1967 story 9 Billion Names of God by Arthur C Clarke, where a Tibetan monastery are calculating all possible names of God, which they think will be some sort of culmination of the universe.
When I first read it I hadn't noticed that it was written when using a computer to print all the possible combinations of something was still quite new.
It does feel like all those permutations make sense in a Buddhist monastery, but AFAIK he must have based that on Kaballah and made up the connection to Buddhism.
He wrote it in a long weekend away. But he added a comment that there was something wrong with the maths and he'd needed to fix it later so I guess he didn't QUITE finish it in one go :)
The numbers be gave were 9 billion names, 15,000 years by hand, 100 days by computer printout. A custom alphabet. 9 letters at most. And a few combinations are forbidden. I'm guessing he chose 9 billion as a good sounding title and a reasonable length of time, but that something^something didn't quite come out at 9 billion, so added the forbidden combinations or custom alphabet to adjust it a bit.
When I first read it I hadn't noticed that it was written when using a computer to print all the possible combinations of something was still quite new.
It does feel like all those permutations make sense in a Buddhist monastery, but AFAIK he must have based that on Kaballah and made up the connection to Buddhism.
He wrote it in a long weekend away. But he added a comment that there was something wrong with the maths and he'd needed to fix it later so I guess he didn't QUITE finish it in one go :)
The numbers be gave were 9 billion names, 15,000 years by hand, 100 days by computer printout. A custom alphabet. 9 letters at most. And a few combinations are forbidden. I'm guessing he chose 9 billion as a good sounding title and a reasonable length of time, but that something^something didn't quite come out at 9 billion, so added the forbidden combinations or custom alphabet to adjust it a bit.