History
In conceiving Multivac, Asimov was extrapolating the trend towards centralization that characterised computation technology planning in the 1950s to an ultimate centrally managed global computer. After seeing a planetarium adaptation, Asimov "privately" concluded that this story was his best science fiction yet written; he placed it just higher than "The Ugly Little Boy" and "The Bicentennial Man". "The Last Question" ranks with "Nightfall" and other stories as one of Asimov's best-known and most acclaimed short stories.
The story was first adapted for the Abrams Planetarium at Michigan State University in 1966 featuring the voice of Leonard Nimoy, as Asimov wrote in his autobiography In Joy Still Felt. It was adapted for the Strasenburgh Planetarium in Rochester, New York in 1969, under the direction of Ian C. McLennan. It played at the Hayden Planetarium in the Boston Museum of Science in the 1970s. The show also appeared at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco, California in the early 1980s.
A reading of the story can also be periodically heard on BBC 7 radio in the United Kingdom.
Asimov wrote of it in 1973:
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- 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.
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- 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.
Read more about this topic: The Last Question
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