Seems we're just all extremely lucky that John the Ripper doesn't have a Print option.
posted by flabdablet at 7:26 AM on October 2 [1 favorite]

I was thinking about this story recently and realized I had it misfiled in my head as an Asimov.

I remember when I first read it in my teens thinking it was, ultimately, a silly little story. (It probably didn't help that I was convinced, with an adolescence-fueled dogmatic certainty that hard science fiction was the only real science fiction). The story's literal Deus Ex Machina made it, in my eyes, a bit of a lark.

In the decades since I first read it I have revisited it a few times and enjoyed it more each time.
posted by Pemdas at 7:35 AM on October 2 [1 favorite]

I first read this when I was young -- probably around 12 or 13 -- and it took me a bit to realize lama and llama were two different things.
posted by AzraelBrown at 8:00 AM on October 2

Skimming the ¡°deep dive¡± link, not really reading it, pondering ways in which ¡°the nine billion names of God¡± could be a metaphor, and combining it with the idea that we are all God, split into countless fragments, experiencing this universe from every angle at once, in every detail, lead me to check what the current world population is:

8.2 billion.

Projections of current growth rates suggest that we hit nine billion around the end of 2037, and 9.5 in 2046.
posted by egypturnash at 8:01 AM on October 2 [3 favorites]

"Have you heard of the monks of T'Shuva?"
Fry: "I've... not heard of them."
posted by SPrintF at 8:21 AM on October 2 [1 favorite]

I was reminded of this story when watching The Life of Chuck recently. That movie wears a lot of sci-fi references on its sleeve.
posted by rhamphorhynchus at 9:09 AM on October 2 [1 favorite]

That video about it as cosmic horror came up on my YouTube home page the other day, and while I haven't watched it yet, referring to The Nine Billion Names of God as "forgotten" anything is delusional, it's one Clarke's best known and most widely-read short stories. I mean, it's great, but we're hardly discovering long-lost gems here.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 1:52 PM on October 2 [1 favorite]

You are not currently logged in. Log in or create a new account to post comments.