Indeed, we may even posit that Clarke wrote ‘The Nine Billion Names of God’ as a kind of riposte to all of the nuclear war stories being produced in the early 1950s.
Of course, it’s unlikely that a rationalist such as Clarke believed that discovering the names of God would bring about this apocalypse (although we may detect some significance in the fact that such a discovery is only made possible by technology, by the invention of a supercomputer capable of carrying out the calculations), but in rejecting more dramatic ideas of the end of the world, he is reminding us that, nevertheless, the end of the world will arrive, one day. Our sun is on borrowed time one day, life on Earth will cease to be completely and the solar system will be no more. What is Clarke suggesting by such an ending? One possible interpretation is that he is reminding us that, sure enough, one day, the world will end.
The description of the apocalypse could not be more anticlimactic at the end of the story: this is the world ending with not even whimper, let alone a bang, but a mere winking of stars as they disappear from the night sky ‘without a fuss’.
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