Earlier quoted context omitted.
Link for the curious: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=What+is+the+last+questi...
I think he meant https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=How+may+entropy+be+rev...
That's way cooler, you're right.
The Last Question
11–20 of 69 posts
Re: The Last Question
#12A 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.
Re: The Last Question
#13The 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.
Re: The Last Question
#14This is still my favorite Asimov story, and I've a big chunk of his canon.
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…
> 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.
Re: The Last Question
#15Wow! The ending literally made me feel giddy.
I got goosebumps.
Re: The Last Question
#16This is still my favorite Asimov story, and I've a big chunk of his canon.
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…
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. :)
Re: The Last Question
#17There's another piece called "The Last Answer" - http://www.thrivenotes.com/the-last-answer/ which is pretty awesome in its own right.
Re: The Last Question
#18If you liked this, you will love Greg Egans Diaspora .
Or Clarke's Childhood's End...
Re: The Last Question
#19Odd that this is Asimov's favorite - it seems so inferior to Nightfall, or The Dead Past, or probably some others that I am forgetting.
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".
Re: The Last Question
#20Silence must fall when the last question is asked.