The Nine Billion Names of God

"This is a 1967 selection that Clarke himself put together; so these are his own personal favourites. As I said, he was initially a magazine writer, and produced a whole series of short stories. A number of short stories lead on into the novels: ‘Guardian Angel’ becomes Childhood’s End , for example. And in The Nine Billion Names of God, we have ‘The Sentinel,’ which would be one of the stories that feed into 2001: A Space Odyssey . But ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ is a delightful story itself. We have a group of Tibetan monks – Clarke is suspicious of most religions, he claimed to be an atheist, but he definitely had a soft spot for Buddhism, as Jim Clarke has written about. The monks have for centuries been writing out all the names of God, compiling them – the project is to know God, and if you can compile all of them, you will have absolute knowledge. And then they realise, crikey! this is going to take us about another 15,000 years, just writing all the names. So let’s get this newfangled thing – because this is a story from 1953 – called a computer. They get an early IBM computer basically – this is when IBM was beginning to sell their computers into workplaces. So it speeds up the whole process: fantastic. We now know the true name of God and all the different permutations and variations that the computer algorithmically put together. At which point we have this marvellous line… It’s interesting, the story is not told by one of the Tibetan monks, but by an outside viewpoint character. As he walks away from the monastery, he looks up at the night sky. And, to paraphrase, the stars are quietly going out. (Which of course is scientifically impossible. The distance of light from the stars to Earth, you know, they wouldn’t just automatically just go out. But hey, Doctor Who has done that more recently.) So once we know God, the universe ends. You can see how that leads into things like Douglas Adams in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – there’s this whole joke that if we ever do find out the true meaning of the universe, maybe the universe would just disappear. And maybe that’s already happened, and we’ve got an even more crazy version in its place. The ending is a classic short story technique. It uses a twist device, as we see so often in classic British short fiction, late Victorian or Edwardian. But it’s also something else… It reminds me of the ending to a story by Jack London, ‘To Build a Fire’ – which is not a science fiction story at all. But in ‘To Build a Fire,’ there’s an amazing shift from the mundane to the cosmological, and then back again. Similarly here: we go from the guy saying goodbye to the monks and walking out of the monastery – then he looks up, and all the stars are going out. It’s a shift from an insignificant character to a sense of the cosmological, and it’s so lovingly and neatly done. And I think that’s an absolute quintessence of Clarke’s writing: the way that he balances between mundane characters, workaday characters, and then that sense of the cosmological, the metaphysical. He’s not a religious writer – he claimed to have no religious belief – but he does have a sense of the spiritual and the numinous. Another interesting story in the collection is ‘The Star.’ It’s told from the point of view of a Jesuit priest, who acts as a kind of ship’s chaplain. They discover evidence of the Star of Bethlehem – but in the story, we discover that the star was actually a supernova, and it would have destroyed an entire civilisation. And the priest is then hit with this crisis of faith: how could a loving God wipe out an entire civilisation in a planetary system light years away, in order to hail the birth of his son? The Jesuit priest is an utterly sincere man, who’s treated with absolute faithfulness by Clarke – he’s not in any shape or form pejorative or condemning of this character. But then he poses an existential drama that calls the character’s belief into crisis. And again we have that lovely turn: a wonderful effect where Clarke turns on a sixpence, and shifts the perspective around. Again, it has echoes of Wells. I think it’s a lovely, lovely collection, which really shows Clarke’s dexterity as a writer. It goes back to the word I used earlier, which is humility. His nickname was Ego, and there may have been his personal ego, you know, having to show off his knowledge. But in his writing and his craft, he’s very humble and open minded. He isn’t a Richard Dawkins character. He’s really happy to sit with a whole number of different belief systems, from the scientific to the spiritual. He’ll make it known that personally, he doesn’t believe – but his writing tells a different story. And I think that’s actually really interesting."