The Last Question

Pages: 16
Published: 1956
Language: English

First published in 1956, "The Last Question" is Isaac Asimov's own favorite among his stories: a compact epic that follows a single question across trillions of years. In 2061, two technicians ask the supercomputer Multivac whether the heat death of the universe can ever be undone — whether entropy can be reversed. Multivac cannot yet answer.

The story then leaps forward again and again — through interstellar colonization, humanity's merging with its machines, and the slow guttering of the stars — returning each time to the same unanswered question, posed to ever more powerful successors of Multivac. Across cosmic timescales, generations rise, spread across the galaxy, and fade, while the computers keep gathering data.

Spare and idea-driven, it is one of the most anthologized science-fiction shorts ever written, admired for turning a single thermodynamic problem into a meditation on time, knowledge, and endings.

Prose complexity: 4/10

Thought-Provoking Philosophical Reflective Atmospheric

Space Opera Time Travel Science Fiction Short Stories Classics Hard Sci-Fi

Isaac Asimov

Asimov was born sometime between October 4, 1919 and January 2, 1920 in Petrovichi in Smolensk Oblast, RSFSR (now Russia), the son of a Jewish family of millers. Although his exact date of birth is uncertain, Asimov himself celebrated it on January 2. His family emigrated to Brooklyn, New York and opened a candy store when he was three years old. He taught himself to read at the age of five. He began reading the science fiction pulp magazines that his family's store carried. Around the age of...