Look past the more entertainingly dated elements - expressions like “for Pete’s sake,” enormous central computers that print all their output on paper slips, an early reference to “highballs” - and you find plenty of elements that qualify as eternal: the ever more rapid expansion of humanity, the ever more rapid progress of technology, and the seemingly ever-faltering ability of the former to maintain dominance over the latter. Nimoy first read “The Last Question” aloud for an adaptation staged at Michigan State University’s Abrams Planetarium in 1966, a production that first moved Asimov himself to consider ranking its source material among his best works. Of course, the story would have received none of this retrospective attention, from its author or others, if not for its intellectual content, which comes through vividly no matter how you take it in. You certainly won’t forget who wrote the story if you can hear it read by Leonard Nimoy, surely the most distinctive sci-fi narrator of our time, in the video just above. They don’t remember the title but when they describe the story it is invariably ‘The Last Question.'” 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.

This sort of thing endears any story to any writer.” But it also had, and continues to have, “the strangest effect on my readers. “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. “Why is it my favorite?” Asimov later wrote.

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