The Last Question

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

by wskinner • 13 years ago

219 63 13 years ago

filer.case.edu

lowmagnet• 13 years ago

This is still my favorite Asimov story, and I've a big chunk of his canon.

dreen• 13 years ago

It's not only yours and mine favorite - its also a favorite of Asimov himself. Here is what he written about The Last Question in the 1973 release of "The Best of Isaac Asimov":

‘The Last Question’ is my personal favorite, the one story I made sure would not be omitted from this collection. Why is it my favorite? For one thing I got the idea all at once and didn’t have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can write them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question’. This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, ‘Dr. Asimov, there’s a story I think you wrote, whose title I can’t remember–’ at which point I interrupted to tell him it was ‘The Last Question’ and when I described the plot it proved to be indeed the story he was after. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles. No other story I have written has anything like this effect on my readers—producing at once an unshakeable memory of the plot and an unshakeable forgettery of the title and even author. I think it may be that the story fills them so frighteningly full, that they can retain none of the side-issues.

geon• 13 years ago

> I got the idea all at once and didn’t have to fiddle with it; and I wrote it in white-heat and scarcely had to change a word. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer.

I have had that experience about code twice. The first was when I "got" how I could use recursion to draw a Koch curve fractal. That was in highschool, using VB5. The second time a few years later, when I (on my own) came up with the trie datastructure. I used it to count the frequencies of words in The Hichhikers Guide To The Galaxy.

some_googler2• 13 years ago

The "unshakeable forgettery of the author", and also the surprising nature of the ending for many readers, may be caused by the well-known fact that Asimov was a staunch Atheist, so you wouldn't normally expect even an oblique theogony to come out his typewriter. :)

michielvoo2• 13 years ago

Well worth reading for the (unexpected) outcome, and the story has an underlying theory that has been discussed on HN before (you will find out which theory that is by reading the story, I don't want to spoil it).

Also interesting is that Asimov starts out with the concept of a huge supercomputer, named MULTIVAC (which is not unexpected given that it was written in the 50's), but in the story the 'AC' gradually evolves into a system of interconnected computers.

gruseom• 13 years ago

What underlying theory do you have in mind? It seems like Nietzsche's eternal recurrence to me.

michielvoo2• 13 years ago

I detect two theories relevant to HN readers.

Spoilers ahead...

You have been warned...

The story moves towards a technological singularity [1]. This is a term Asimov could have been familar with at the time of writing. The name MULTIVAC is obviously inspired by the ENIAC and UNIVAC. So it's safe to assume Asimov was aware of the writings of Von Neumann.

The unintended consequence of creating this artificial intelligence is creation as described in Genesis.

I interpret the underlying message of this story to be 'our reality is a simulated reality [2]' since it was created by AI. I don't know if Asimov would have agreed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulated_reality

alinajaf• 13 years ago

If you liked this, you will love Greg Egans Diaspora.

some_googler2• 13 years ago

Or Clarke's Childhood's End...

thetylerhayes• 13 years ago

So very, very good.

I would also recommend The Light of Other Days.

gmaslov• 13 years ago

I was inordinately tickled to discover that Wolfram|Alpha's database includes this question as an easter egg.

habosa3• 13 years ago

Link for the curious: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+last+questi...

theon144• 13 years ago

I think he meant

https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+may+entropy+be+rev...

elliptic2• 13 years ago

Odd that this is Asimov's favorite - it seems so inferior to Nightfall, or The Dead Past, or probably some others that I am forgetting.

riffraff• 13 years ago

thank you for reminding me of a couple more great stories!

But, if you believe these are superior writings to the one in TFA you should probably expand on why.

IMO The Last Question is so loved because it hits readers with a much stronger emotional force than Nightfall or The Dead Past. Possibly it's the usage of that specific formula, at the end, which already carries so much weight.

I, for one, believe only another short fiction had the same effect on me when i first read it as a kid: Frederic Brown's "Sentry".

elliptic2• 13 years ago

Well, that's fair. I suppose I don't in general think much of stories that are essentially philosophical inquiries, with a little bit of "plot" added on. I'm just not emotionally affected by the "Wow" at the end, like I was in Nightfall, or how I was affected by the dead child aspect of "The Dead Past."

Also, I think that "The Dead Past" really demonstrates the apex of Asimov's technical writing ability in a way that the format of "The Last Question" doesn't really allow.

Tycho• 13 years ago

C'mon, it's like the best plot twist ever, and Asimov prided himself on plot twists.

tripzilch• 13 years ago

dreen quoted Asimov upthread, on why he considers it his favourite: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5585271

Nav_Panel• 13 years ago

As much as I love "The Last Question," My favorite Asimov short story is "Profession" (I read it in the same story anthology as "The Last Question): http://www.abelard.org/asimov.php

Described on that site as "an allegorical description of the manner in which education currently functions in our primitive western societies," I found it (as a child/early teen especially) to be one of his more engaging and relevant works. Check it out if you get a chance, although note that it's somewhat longer than "The Last Question."

IvyMike• 13 years ago

"Profession" is the first thing I think about whenever I start to think about my own career development.

In the end, the question is which kind of engineer do I really want to be? And my answer is that the world has enough Amand Trevelyans. I want to be George Platen.

Apreche• 13 years ago

A true classic. This comes up in discussions among my friends often. It's at the point where someone can just say "that's the Last Question," and everyone knows.

greatquux• 13 years ago

The last time this discussion came up, someone posted a link to the related-but-not-really-but-still-a-good-story "The Last Answer" http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/ and I greatly enjoyed reading it.

RaSoJo• 13 years ago

Wow! The ending literally made me feel giddy. I got goosebumps.

sigkill• 13 years ago

There's another piece called "The Last Answer" - http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/ which is pretty awesome in its own right.

notahacker• 13 years ago

I like Fredric Brown's Answer which is a more cynical take on the Question theme... http://www.roma1.infn.it/~anzel/answer.html

bayesianhorse• 13 years ago

Silence must fall when the last question is asked.

mindcrime3• 13 years ago

On the Fields of Trenzalore, on the Fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a question will be asked...

fennecfoxen2• 13 years ago

Yes, but that's the first question in the universe, not the final question.

trumbitta2• 13 years ago

And now I know where Charles Stross did find inspiration for Accelerando.

Great story.

DaNmarner2• 13 years ago

The story boils down to:

1. Is the second law of thermodynamic wrong? 2. Does P equals NP (or, if 1 is true, then how and how long will it take to solve it?) 3. What's God?

GuiA• 13 years ago

Oh goodness, this hilarious.

Someone posting a link to a short story by one of the greatest SF writers all of time, whose writings spawned entire threads of reflexion and discussion in many disciplines; and a HN comment being a dismissive tl;dr.

andrewljohnson2• 13 years ago

I didn't find the comment to be dismissive actually. What's wrong with writing a story that explores the boundaries of science and god? That must have been a pretty natural thing for someone living in Asimov's era to do.

davidw• 13 years ago

De gustibus non est disputandum, as they say. I don't care for this story either, it's less of an actual story, and more of a "what if" that feels somehow a bit corny to me.

DaNmarner2• 13 years ago

I actually consider pointing out the scientific elements of a SF piece is the best kind of compliment.

_debug_4• 13 years ago

What a waste of time that was! I felt greatly cheated by the ending. It was exactly as if I had met a friendly, neatly dressed, smiling person on the street who, after 5 minutes, turned out to be peddling his religion after all.

Honestly, I have thought of much better stories myself. I remember GREATLY enjoying Asimov as a teenager, and I am pretty sure this is not his best story.

andrewljohnson2• 13 years ago

You have _thought_ of better stories yourself, but have you ever _written_ a better story. I'm pretty incredulous of anyone who claims to write better than Isaac Asimov. Strikes me the same way people who never built anything go around ripping on other people's products. Truly classic internet delusions of grandeur.

_debug_4• 13 years ago

> Truly classic internet delusions of grandeur.

The delusion is yours : you don't know who you are talking to on the Internet, and you have assumed that the other anonymous writer is as mundane as you are. Says something about you, not me.

The irony of thinking, "Since I think Asimov / Steve Jobs / Linus / whoever is awesome, and so many other people agree, it MUST mean that the dissenting commentor is a troll or having 'delusions of grandeur'" is that when these people started out, I'm pretty sure self-appointed X Factor judges of the world future such as yourself told them exactly the same thing. "How deluded to think you can write an Operating System, you puny mortal, you Linus?!"

You are a follower, not a leader.

Edit : the person who wrote, "Asimov was an atheist. You misunderstood the story" is the one you have to learn from.

a3n• 13 years ago

It doesn't necessarily need to be a religion.

It's clear that something like what we call The Big Bang happened. But we can only trace back time and space to the origin. What happened "before" the origin is probably unknowable to us on this side of the origin. The best we can do is speculate, in scientific or literary terms.

So think of this as speculative fiction, expressed in terms of the author's time.

Personally I thought the progression of man through the ages was the most interesting part of the story.

_debug_4• 13 years ago

> Personally I thought the progression of man through the ages was the most interesting part of the story.

That was true for me, too.

philwelch• 13 years ago

Wow. HN is officially over when even "The Last Question" gets the top-comment middlebrow dismissal treatment.

nbouscal• 13 years ago

Asimov was an atheist. You misunderstood the story.

eksith2• 13 years ago

Asimov, as mentioned previously, was an atheist.

The ending was a powerful metaphor of what it may mean to know all and how such an all knowing entity may act when there is no one else around to share this existence.

This story isn't about religion wherein the origin of life and all that exists is explained on the basis of faith. This is a story on how such an origin can take place in a setting of speculative fiction that doesn't push faith at all. I feel sorry for you that you couldn't enjoy the ending or understand Asimov for that matter.

_debug_4• 13 years ago

The mention of that particular metaphor "Let there be light" is quite significant and is the thing that repulses me. I felt me that even the subtle negation of God by introducing a Deus Ex Machina (literally) is rooted in the notion of his particular Christian God that he is negating. It only gives strength to the other fiction by trying to negate it.

The wow-isnt-the-ending-"clever" negation of an ending actually fell flat for me. It really is a trite device if you think about it.

I feel sorry for you and all others who think they feel sorry for me because I have a differing opinion which you presume is inferior. In reality, I believe your opinion is probably just conforming rather than well thought-out : you you you think it's awesome, but I question whether you are even thinking and just think it's awesome because it's Asimov. That's no different from the premium a shopper pays for Prada because, duh, it's Prada.

dvanduzer• 13 years ago

Does anyone know what happened to multivax.com?

alanh• 13 years ago

Previously discussed on HN, including:

Most comments, over a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3691113

4 years previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=595419

Apocryphon• 13 years ago

How poetic that this story be the one to be reposted and retold, again and again, until-

smoyer• 13 years ago

Until the entropy of HN makes it impossible to post or read a final time?

AlexanderDhoore• 13 years ago

CurtMonash• 13 years ago

It's a great story because it's a straightforward technological speculation which then takes a twist.

That said, Arthur C. Clarke's The Star -- http://www.uni.edu/morgans/astro/course/TheStar.pdf -- is weaker on the technology but stronger on the heartstring-tugging. It is also a great story, in a similar vein.

And relevant to The Star, but not really in the same vein, there's James Blish's novel A Case of Conscience ... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Case_of_Conscience

Fzzr• 13 years ago

For something a little lighter, "The Last-but-One Question" by Sam Hughes. http://qntm.org/question

_kst_• 13 years ago

Isn't this a copyright violation, or has the story entered the public domain?

stat• 13 years ago

I reformatted the story for better readability and included audio, read by Henry Goodman: https://googledrive.com/host/0B2j3XwTC5tA6dUg5QXBTQVNtV2c/Th...

j0j0r0• 13 years ago

i saw this as a little kid with my dad as a slide show at a planetarium...(omnisphere in wichita, ks)

as a kid, it was ok, but slightly boring until the very end, when after minutes of complete darkness very bright lights came and the planetarium stars went spinning ... it made the whole room seem to spin.

i remembered it all that time, but could never discover who wrote it...

so, thanks.

The Last Question

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