‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov

Short Story Club: Isaac Asimov

Life is too short to read all the great works, but not too short to try. 

Though many unread classics may loom large on our bookshelves, intimidating in their vast size, others are surprisingly slim. Indeed, masters of the short story, like Kafka, Borges, or Calvino, can contain more of life’s complexity in a few pages than some novels do in thousands.

So, let’s spare a few moments of our day to read some great literature. After all, our time on earth is finite. Let us not squander it; let us read instead.

‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov (1956)

Isaac Asimov is considered one of the ‘Big 3’ Science Fiction writers, alongside Arthur C. Clarke and Robert A. Heinlein. Incredibly prolific, the Russian-born American had a hand in no less than 500 books, while also writing some 90,000 postcards and letters over the course of his life.

Among all those words written, his favourite work of his own was that of “The Last Question.” In 1973, he wrote of the story:

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 give 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.

The story had the same effect on me; since I first read ‘The Last Question’ as a teenager I’ve found myself thinking about it over and over again, but I only recently rediscovered it was by the same man who wrote the Foundation trilogy. Asimov himself attributes this phenomenon to the simple idea that drives the story drowning out everything else about it, including its title and the author.

That makes sense to me, because in a mere nine pages, Asimov relates the entire future-history of the cosmos, from the year 2061 to the heat-death of the universe, while also addressing some of the most profound philosophical and theological questions. As with all the best Sci-Fi stories, its themes seem to only have become more relevant with time. Recent advances in AI have made the Multivac — the supercomputer machine introduced in the first few lines — feel all the more imminent. I’m sure as soon as we’re able, we too will be asking our machines the last question.

Here is a link to the story. Alternatively, if you prefer listening to your fiction, here’s a video of someone reading the story aloud.

Please have a read when you have time this week, and come back to this post for our discussion group in the comments. I look forward to hearing your thoughts.