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The Answer (1954)

sfshortstories.com

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I think if a story gives you a sense of wonder when you're young, it's a good story, even if it seems cheesy later. Probably the reason it doesn't later is that you saw so many things like that when you were young and they don't surprise you anymore.

I agree.

I would give anything to feel a sense of wonder that I used to get when reading sci-fi in my youth.

But "can't enter the same river twice" and all that.

Who's writing good scifi these days which evoke that same sense of wonder? Project Hail Mary was a fun read but felt a bit too in the weeds with the details.

Gotta be Ted Chiang. Try his short story collection titled Exhalation: Stories.

A bit like saying Shakespeare is full of cliché’s. Which it is, but it literally invented those cliché’s.

Reminds me quite a bit of Asimov’s “The Last Question”, which mines the same “computer-as-God” vein, is also very short, and has a suspiciously related title. Asimov’s story appeared in 1956, just two years later.

My exact thought process on seeing the title here: "Ah, 'insufficient data for meaningful answer'. No, wait, that one's called 'The Last Question'. So perhaps it's 'There is now'." :-)

(Asimov's is better. Also, the version of this one in my memory is better than the actual story, in that "There is now" is better than the rather clunky equivalent in the story. I suppose it's possible that I'm remembering a different, slightly better written, story with the exact same idea.)

Came here to ask what was the Asimov story that echoed this ...

You might call it weak and gimmicky all you want, but it entrenched itself deeply into our collective imagination.

I saw many people come up independently with a direct quote from this story when they saw the IBM promotional image of a man standing in front of an IBM Quantum System One machine.

The image: https://www.techmonitor.ai/wp-content/uploads/sites/29/2023/...

I think humans are weak and prone to leaping on gimmicks and extrapolating with limited information to wherever their imagination takes them.

If shown a dazzling, mysterious, $10m glass cube draped with all that hyperbolic "quantum future wow!!" marketing, ordinarily smart people will leap to anything. In reality, QC doesn't seem to have a ton of applications yet.

A lot, if not all, of those references were in jest. Nobody was expecting the machine to be an actual deity.

The post you're replying to doesn't suggest anyone expected deification.

The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality.

> The post suggests sparkly marketing hooplah wrapping up meager actuality.

I don't think any of those who quoted from this story fell into the marketing hyperbole. We all know these machines are interesting engineering marvels, but far from actually useful at the moment, with the exception of a very narrow set of problems that fall within the narrow capabilities. The people who fell for it probably never heard of this story.

Direct link: https://archive.org/details/angelsspaceships0000fred/page/36...

The review is only a little shorter than the story!

I remember trying this on Wolfram Alpha when it launched back around 2010. https://smallthingsmostly.me/istheregod

See Arthur C. Clark, Nine Billion Names of God, from 1953

It's the same story as "Company Man", posted here yesterday. But it was a new idea when Asimov wrote it.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45443298>

Was there a similar Asimov story that ended with the words, "let there be light!" ?

Yep. Called "The Last Question": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Question

Fred Brown is also responsible for a famous Star Trek episode

https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Fredric_Brown

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