The Last Question

In the end, the question is which kind of engineer do I really want to be? And my answer is that the world has enough Amand Trevelyans. I want to be George Platen.

‘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 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 write 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. No other story I have written has anything like this effect on my readers—producing at once an unshakeable memory of the plot and an unshakeable forgettery of the title and even author. I think it may be that the story fills them so frighteningly full, that they can retain none of the side-issues.

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".

Someone posting a link to a short story by one of the greatest SF writers all of time, whose writings spawned entire threads of reflexion and discussion in many disciplines; and a HN comment being a dismissive tl;dr.

It's clear that something like what we call The Big Bang happened. But we can only trace back time and space to the origin. What happened "before" the origin is probably unknowable to us on this side of the origin. The best we can do is speculate, in scientific or literary terms.

So think of this as speculative fiction, expressed in terms of the author's time.

Personally I thought the progression of man through the ages was the most interesting part of the story.

The ending was a powerful metaphor of what it may mean to know all and how such an all knowing entity may act when there is no one else around to share this existence.

This story isn't about religion wherein the origin of life and all that exists is explained on the basis of faith. This is a story on how such an origin can take place in a setting of speculative fiction that doesn't push faith at all. I feel sorry for you that you couldn't enjoy the ending or understand Asimov for that matter.