Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question": The Potential of Science Fiction Narration

One of my favorite Isaac Asimov short stories is "The Last Question," published in 1956 in the pulp science fiction magazine Science Fiction Quarterly. At just under 4500 words, it tells the story of the fate of humanity, the cosmic intelligence humanity creates, and the entire life and death of the universe.

Think about it: 4500 words and the entire story of the cosmos is related to you. This is truly astounding, a word etymologically linked to the latin extonare (which means to be struck with lightning). It not only "makes you think," but it blows up your mind, if you will.

Some summary: the story opens and some computer engineers are celebrating together because they have just built a supercomputer that has been able to solve all of humanity's problems. Economic scarcity, political differences, production, everything: all these crises have been solved by the computer called Multivac.

In spite of their happiness, however, they start thinking about the far future. In conformity with scientific law, they hypothesize, the universe will and has to end entropically. It will simply fade away. This is the famous problem of entropy that shows up throughout a lot of the science fiction of the 1960s and 70s and onward.

In spite of their happiness, these engineers can't stop dwelling on the fact that they have just saved a world that will necessarily be destroyed. In fact, destruction, according to their hypothesis, is a physical certainty.

And so they ask their computer a question: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" In other words, how do we stop the universe from being destroyed. The computer's answer. Five words: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. The story proceeds and more and more computers are made throughout the many eras of the universe until, finally--can't help but spoil it--an answer is found for this question.

There's a lot going on in this story. I want to highlight two elements I find interesting.

First element: this story paints an interesting picture about humanity's relationship with technology. In large part, technology is painted as a kind of savior of humanity. Without giving away the end of the story, the computers continue to grow and human interactions with computers become more and more intimate; eventually, computers and humanity are inextricably bound together in a kind of "erotic" union. This is the story of human's merging with computers and technology, a story told over and over in science fiction in the form of cyborgs, androids, intelligent machines, etc..

Second element: we have in this story a powerful demonstration of the potential of science fiction narration. Incorporating the mythology of science into its narrative logic, science fiction texts are able to represent not only the human world--which is somewhat limited (in space, in time--a city, a nation, a planet)--but the entire cosmos. Let me be clear: there are no pychologically nuanced characters in this story. Human beings, in this narrative, are less individuals and more a flowing force of energy, like the molocules of water in a river; nevertheless, this sort of macro-perspective is something science fiction really does well.

If you haven't read this Isaac Asimov's, "The Last Question," it's available online for free. Here's the link: "The Last Question."