In 1952, long before computers were commonplace, Clarke wrote this story of a super computer and its rather...unique...use by a bunch of Tibetan Buddhist monks.
He wrote it over the course of one rainy weekend in NYC at the Roosevelt Hotel (which still stands in Manhattan) - undoubtedly he either typed it, or wrote it up longhand, as it was before word processors existed.
Clarke says in the introduction that the story took on a life of its own and that the premise of the story was once reported by the BBC as an actual fact.
That premise was that the monks of a monastary up in the mountains of Tibet bought a supercomputer to figure out the billions of possible names of God.The POV characters are the engineer who sell them the computer, and then the engineers who install it for the monks. The engineers -while performing their jobs - do not take the job particularly seriously. They call it the Shangri La project, and call the head of the monastery after a Hollywood character actor who appeared in the film
Lost Horizon as a Buddhist monk.
One of the two engineers finds out (once the monks' project is nearly completed) that what the monks are really trying to do is to list the billions of names of god because once the human race has named all of those names, the humans race has fulfilled its existence, and the universe will come to an end.
The engineers do not believe that will happen, and wonder if
* they and their computer will be blamed when the end does not happen
* what if anything, will happen to the monks and their faith when the end does not come (and whether or not the monks will become violent)
Since they are vastly outnumbered by the monks, they decide to stall the project by making some b.s. repairs to the computer to delay the last computations to the time their plane will come in and then leaving for their transport before the last name comes spitting out of the computer...
As the engineers are about to climb on board the plane at the foot of the mountain, they say it is about time for the computer to be done with its calculations. And then the sky, filled with the bright stars you only see in clear skies at high altitudes, suddenly starts to go dark...
I really liked this story because it is rare for a science fiction writer to throw high tech (and super computers would be very high tech indeed in the 1950's) with high faith (particularly non-Judeo-Christian high faith) in one story and then show a lot of respect for both.
Login
FAQ
