The Last Question
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Categories: Articles lacking sources from January 2008 | All articles lacking sources | Short stories by Isaac Asimov | 1956 short stories
"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973) and Robot Dreams (1986), as well as the retrospective Opus 100 (1969). It is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac.
History
In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterised computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation, Asimov "privately" concluded that this story was his best science fiction yet written; he placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man." "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" and other stories as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. Overall, it is considered to be one of the greatest science fiction short stories ever written. The story was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University in 1966 featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York in 1969, under the direction of Ian C. McLennan, A reading of the story can also be periodically heard on BBC 7 radio. Plot summary
The story deals with the development of a computer called Multivac and its relationship with humanity through the course of seven historic settings, beginning in 2061. In each of the first six scenes a character presents the computer with a question, namely as to how the threat to human existence posed by heat death can be averted. The question is equivalent to: "Can the workings of the second law of thermodynamics (used in the story as the increase of the entropy of the universe), be reversed?" In each case the computer finds itself unable to answer, due to having "insufficient data for a meaningful answer". In the last scenes, the god-like descendants of humanity watch the universe finally approach the state of heat death and ask the Cosmic AC, Multivac's descendant, the question one last time before "Man" merges with it. Cosmic AC is still unable to answer, but continues to ponder the question after space and time cease to exist. Eventually the Cosmic AC discovers the answer, but has nobody to report it to; the universe is already dead. It therefore decides to show the answer by demonstrating the reversal of entropy, creating the universe anew; the story ends with AC's pronouncement, "'LET THERE BE LIGHT!' And there was light—".[1] See alsoExternal linksReferences
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