And so we come to the third of the Big Three, but of course, Isaac Asimov is always number one in my book.

In the 1950s when Isaac Asimov began writing a series of stories about a computer that he called Multivac, a sort of super-computer descended from Univac, he wrote what could very well be the ultimate computer story and called it “The Last Question”. It was eventually included in his Nine Tomorrows collection, which is where I first encountered it.

It made quite an impression on me, but I forgot both the name of the story as well as who wrote it and where I read it. Apparently that was a quite common reaction. But I got reacquainted with the story when Dr. Asimov included it in his Opus 100 book, and since then I’ve been able to remember who wrote it. 

Anyway, here is Asimov describing the origin of the story in his autobiography:

On June 1, 1956, I received a request from Bob Lowndes for another story. I was already thinking about writing another story about Multivac (“Franchise,” which had been the first, had been written as a direct consequence of my introduction to Univac in the 1952 election).

I had worked out ever greater developments of Multivac, and eventually I was bound to consider how far I could go; how far the human mind (or, anyway, my human mind) could reach.

So as soon as I got Bob’s letter I sat down to write “The Last Question,” which was only forty-seven hundred words long, but in which I detailed the history of ten trillion years with respect to human beings, computers, and the universe. And, in the end—but no, you’ll have to read the story, if you haven’t already.

I wrote the whole thing in two sittings, without a sentence’s hesitation. On June 4 I sent it off, and on June 11 I got the check from Lowndes—at four cents a word.

I knew at the instant of writing it that I had become involved in something special. When I finished it, I said, in my diary, that it was “the computer story to end all computer stories, or, who knows, the science-fiction story to end all science-fiction stories.” Of course, it may well be that no one else agrees with me, but it was my opinion at the time, and it still is today.

It was first published in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.

Asimov has said that “The Last Question” is his personal favorite of all the stories that he wrote:

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 has been adapted many times by planetaria including the Fels Planetarium of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia and the Planetarium of the Reading School District in Reading, Pennsylvania. According to Asimov, “although the payments I requested from the planetaria were modest, ‘The Last Question’ eventually earned more in its planetarium incarnation than it ever did in print.”

Moreover, it’s been the subject of at least one sermon. Again from Asimov’s autobiography:

You can’t write as many items as I do without having some of them turn up in strange places or under strange conditions, and every once in a while something unprecedented would happen. I received an announcement from a Unitarian church in Bedford that my story “The Last Question” would be part of the services on Sunday, January 22.

That was more than I could resist, and since the weather that Sunday was not threatening, I drove my car to the northern suburb (where, a dozen years before, I had considered the possibility of a job), quietly entered the church, and took a seat in the rearmost row.

The minister read the story with considerable verve, and when he came to the end [..] the organ let go with a crash and the effect was tremendous.

The minister had recognized me when I entered, so my attempt at anonymity failed. He wouldn’t let me get away without having me join the coffee-and-cookie session afterward. I wasn’t exactly loath to stay, however, for I never mind being made much of.

Note: I deleted a small spoiler.

It’s because of its incorporation into a church service that I’m including it in this triptych of the Big Three using religion in their fiction, even though Asimov didn’t really intend it to be religious per se.

You can read “The Last Question” in its magazine appearance online here, and there is a pdf of the story available here. I also just found a web site that has the story here. 

All I can say is that everyone that I know who has read the story has enjoyed it, even those who don’t normally like science fiction.

It takes about ten to fifteen minutes to read the story. Here is Asimov himself narrating it in about 30 minutes.