The idea seems to drown out everything - and I’m satisfied that it should. But, of course, they never forget the story itself especially the ending. They seem never to remember the title of the story or (for sure) the author, except for the vague thought it might be me. It is a curious fact that innumerable readers have asked me if I wrote this story. I also undertook another task, but I won’t tell you what that was lest l spoil the story for you. This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written.Īfter all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story and I leave it to you as to how well I succeeded. The second one is quoted on the “Multivax” site itself, but I haven’t been able to find the source (please help).I think it may be that the story fills them so frighteningly full, that they can retain none of the side-issues. 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 left him convinced I could read minds at a distance of a thousand miles. 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.

This has reached the point where I recently received a long-distance phone call from a desperate man who began, ‘Dr. 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 write them the name of a story, which they think I may have written, and tell them where to find it. Then, too, it has had the strangest effect on my readers. This sort of thing endears any story to any writer. 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. ‘The Last Question’ is my personal favorite, the one story I made sure would not be omitted from this collection. In The Best of Isaac Asimov, published in 1973, he says: The first was easier to track down it’s on Wikipedia with a date.Here, for example, are two comments I remember having read about what is definitely one of his two most famous stories, The Last Question: I like tracking down quotes, but find it terribly hard to track down quotes by Asimov about his writing: there are so many anthologies, and so many comments he has made about a single story in different places.

Asimov short story the last question