It is a (quite graphic) novella about the human race after the technological singularity, and I think one of the best pieces of writing on the subject that I have ever read.
Asimov and his works had a huge influence on me growing up, and very likely sparked my interest in mathematics. Glad to see some of his lesser-known short stories making their way to HN.
no, even "the best" is not adequate. He is in another category all together. The one brilliant writer with serious, crushingly rigorous scientific training, who was writing just as the first embers lit by Einstein and the quantum physicists started burning for others, illuminating first chemistry and electronics, then biochemistry and medicine and engineering, then computation and genetics.
There was the Renaissance, then the Enlightment. I think 500 years from now, they will coin the middle of the twentieth century the Illumination. And Asimov will be the remembered bard of the Illumination.
I think that's a little over the top. Great as Asimov was in many ways, he had his flaws as a writer.
Characters and dialogue are probably at the top of the list. I was reading the Foundation series recently and realised that in some of the longer dialogues the characters sounded exactly the same to the point where it was easy to forget who was speaking at any given time, and more to the point it was easy not to care. With the possible exception of the Mule and maybe a few others, the Foundation series doesn't really have any characters, it just has a bunch of puppets who get shuttled around the universe so they can explain the plot to each other.
Then we have the "creepy old man" vibe which creeps into some of his later works, where every female character (and they crop up at the rate of approximately one per book) is described with a particular emphasis on how her breasts look in whatever outfit she happens to be wearing.
But hey, he's a good writer and wrote a lot of interesting stories, plus a few dull ones. Respect is due to him, but I can't see him as one of the key figures of the twentieth century.
I've read several collections of Asimov's short stories and I've never even heard of The Last Answer. I guess maybe it's not considered one of his best, but with its titular connection to his very best story possibly it is famous.
Ha thanks for that. I thought I'd read most of his stuff but I've not seen that before. Do you know whether it was taken from a particular book, or was it published in a magazine or something?
From wikipedia:
"It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and in Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1"
I personally read it in Robot Dreams, which is a great collection of stories.
Pardon me, that answer was for 'The Last Question' (also a truly awesome short story). I'm sure I read this one in one of his collections but I don't remember which and Wikipedia is no help in this case.
Regarding the para of the nexus. What if all we are is a nexus of sensations and thoughts/feelings/experiences. What if even the physical plane is only an experience this nexus goes through. No separate body.
The nexus goes through an experience of death, and maybe something after that, too.
That nexus could be what we call consciousness. (Or it could be the human mind.)
And each consciousness could be a part of a larger nexus, one cosmic nexus with millions of child nexi. At some stage, the nexus merges back with the cosmic nexus like a river into the ocean. Perhaps the cosmic nexus is what some people call God.
http://www.multivax.com/last_question.html?