The Last Question

TL;DR — Asimov’s own favourite of his stories — entropy, a computer, and trillions of years in nine pages.

Asimov’s foreword says it plainly: “This is by far my favorite story of all those I have written. After all, I undertook to tell several trillion years of human history in the space of a short story.”

Humanity repeatedly asks a computer whether entropy can be reversed, across escalating spans of time, and repeatedly receives the same answer until the conditions finally change.

Nine pages, and the final line is among the most-quoted in science fiction. A demonstration that scale is a literary effect, not a page count.

Where this came from

• Will Manidis’s “most underrated PDF” thread

9 pages. A copy is archived locally against link rot; the header links the original source.