Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines by Isaac Asimov

However, in the year 2061, Multivac began to understand deeper fundamentals of humanity. Multivac had been fed data for decades, assessing data and answering questions, allowing man to reach beyond the planetary confines of Earth.

The story centers around Multivac, a self-adjusting and self-correcting computer. I left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles. 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.

This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, 'Dr. They don't remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably 'The Last Question'. Frequently someone writes to ask me if I can give them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. 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. 'The Last Question' ranks with ' Nightfall' (1941) as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories. The story asks the question of humanity's fate, and human existence as a whole, highlighting Asimov's focus on important aspects of our future like population growth and environmental issues. He placed it just higher than ' The Ugly Little Boy' (September 1958) and ' The Bicentennial Man' (1976). After seeing a planetarium adaptation of his work, Asimov 'privately' concluded that the story was his best science fiction yet written. In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterized computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally-managed global computer. The story overlaps science fiction, theology, and philosophy.

Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy. While he also considered it one of his best works, “The Last Question” was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was anthologized in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. ' The Last Question' is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov.

Those Amazing Electronic Thinking Machines by Isaac Asimov