Week 9: Space Opera

            This week was week nine aka, Space Opera week! The semester is really starting to heat up so for this week I needed to read a short story. This week we are covering Space Opera’s such for me and I assume many other people as a much more familiar genre in the form of Space Westerns, the most popular movie in this genre being Star Wars of course. I have to yah that I very much enjoyed the movie Forbidden Planet we watch in class this week. It’s one of the few old iconic Sci-Fi movies from yesteryear, and it was just a great as I had hoped it would be. On to this weeks reading though.

            The short story for this week was the “Nine Billion Names of God”. In short a group of

mountain monks want to print off the billions of names they believe that gods name will bring about the end of mankind. The hire two people from the west to program and build a machine to help them to this. This is a interesting idea and an idea that is parody in other forms of media. (There is an episode of Futurama in which monks look for god in the cosmos through a massive telescope. Fry and Lela even ride donkeys to the stop of the snowy mountain.) As the months roll by the two begin to fear that the monk will lash out at them when god doesn’t show after all nine billion names are printed. The slow down the machine so it finish at their exit flight comes to the mountain. As they fly into the night sky, they see that all the stars have gone out, signally the end of the world.

            After searching the Internet for the meaning of the short story, it seems to be a struggle or a partnership of spiritually and technology. How religion predicts the future put technology can make it come true much quicker.