Tag: Science Fiction Quarterly

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov (Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956)1 is a one of his “Multivac” stories about a giant computer. In this tale, after the computer has been running for several decades, it finally develops a system that provides unlimited solar power for humanity. After this achievement, we then see the Multivac’s two attendants, who are hiding from the publicity in an underground chamber, having a drink and relaxing. Later, an argument develops when one of the two, Adel, contends that that the solar power supply will last forever:

Lupov cocked his head sideways. He had a trick of doing that when he wanted to be contrary, and he wanted to be contrary now, partly because he had had to carry the ice and glassware. “Not forever,” he said.
“Oh, hell, just about forever. Till the sun runs down, Bert.”
“That’s not forever.”
“All right, then. Billions and billions of years. Twenty billion, maybe. Are you satisfied?”
Lupov put his fingers through his thinning hair as though to reassure himself that some was still left and sipped gently at his own drink. “Twenty billion years isn’t forever.”  p. 8

This back and forth continues until Lupov points out that when entropy eventually reaches a maximum (i.e The Heat Death of the Universe, when the temperature everywhere in the Universe is the same), no more free energy will be available. Adell suggests that it may be possible to “build things up again someday”. Lupov disagrees, and so they ask Multivac if it will ever be possible to decrease the amount of entropy in the universe: the computer replies “INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER”.
The rest of the story telescopes through time until the end of the Universe, with many changes taking place during the various sections: Multivac becomes a much smaller machine, and eventually exists in hyperspace (by this point it is called the “Cosmic AC”); meanwhile, humans become immortal, spread throughout the Galaxy and the Universe, turn into disembodied beings, and later merge into one consciousness. At the end of every section someone asks the same question that Adell and Lupov asked and get the same answer.
Finally, ten trillions years later, just before the last man fuses with AC, the question is asked one last time with the same result. Then, in the timeless interval afterwards (spoiler), AC learns how to reverse the direction of entropy:

But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.
For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.
The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.
And AC said, “LET THERE BE LIGHT!”
And there was light—  p. 15

The cosmic and temporal sweep of the story is quite well done but the ending is a gimmick better appreciated at age 12. I’d also suggest the story has a religious or mythological ending rather than a proper sense of wonder one.2 Still, not bad I guess.
*** (Good). 4,450 words. Story link.

1. I assumed that this story had bounced from Astounding, Galaxy and F&SF to Science Fiction Quarterly (a much lower-budget publication) but then I found this in Asimov’s autobiography, In Joy Still Felt:

On June 1, 1956, I received a request from Bob Lowndes for another story. I was already thinking about writing another story about Multivac (“Franchise,” which had been the first, had been written as a direct consequence of my introduction to Univac in the 1952 election).
I had worked out ever greater developments of Multivac, and eventually was bound to consider how far I could go; how far the human mind (or, anyway, my human mind) could reach,
So as soon as I got Bob’s letter I sat down to write “The Last Question,” which was only forty-seven hundred words long, but in which I detailed the history of ten trillion years with respect to human beings, computers, and the universe. And, in the end—but no, you’ll have to read the story, if you haven’t already.
I wrote the whole thing in two sittings, without a sentences hesitation. On June 4 I sent it off, and on June 11 I got the check from Lowndes at four cents a word.
I knew at the instant of writing it that I had become involved in something special. When I finished it, I said, in my diary, that it was “the computer story to end all computer stories, of, who knows, the science-fiction story to end all science-fiction stores.” OF course, it may well be that no one else agrees with me, but it was my opinion at the time, and it still is today.  p. 59

2. Tacking on a religious or mythological ending to provide a sense of wonder is not uncommon, e.g. Arthur C. Clarke’s The Nine Billion Names of God.

Common Time by James Blish

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Common Time by James Blish (Science Fiction Quarterly, August 1953) sees Garrard wake up in a FTL spaceship with the thought “Don’t move!” He struggles to open his eyelids, senses that something is very wrong, and does not attempt to move his body. Eventually, after further description of his physical condition and of his observations, Garrard realises that the infrequent “pock” sound he hears is the hugely slowed down ticking of the ship’s clock. He then counts seconds in his head and discovers that ship time is moving much more slowly than his subjective time—and that it will take him six thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri.
After Garrard gets over the intial shock, he thinks further about the physical ramifications (his body is subject to ship-time, and much slower than the speed his mind is working, so there will be a problem with co-ordination) and the possible mental problems (how will he occupy his time and stave off madness?) Then, as he deliberates, he notices that the clock is speeding up, and that the ship-time is accelerating. Soon, the clock is a blur, and he enters a state of “pseudo-death”.
The next stage of the story sees Garrard awake at Alpha Centauri, where he is greeted by aliens who speak to him in a incomprehensible language (although Garrard can make sense of it):

“How do you hear?” the creature said abruptly. Its voice, or their voices, came at equal volume from every point in the circle, but not from any particular point in it. Garrard could think of no reason why that should be unusual.
“I . . .” he said. “Or we—we hear with our ears. Here.”
His answer, with its unintentionally long chain of open vowel sounds, rang ridiculously. He wondered why he was speaking such an odd language. “We-they wooed to pitch you-yours thiswise,” the creature said. With a thump, a book from the DFC-3’s ample library fell to the deck beside the hammock. “We wooed there and there and there for a many. You are the being-Garrard. We-they are the clinesterton beademung, with all of love.”
“With all of love,” Garrard echoed. The beademung’s use of the language they both were speaking was odd; but again Garrard could find no logical reason why the beademung’s usage should be considered wrong.

After another page or so of Blish channelling (I presume) his inner James Joyce, Garrard sets off for Earth, and once more he experiences pseudo-death.
The final part of the story sees Garrard awake near Uranus, and he soon makes radio contact with Earth. The story then ends with a conversation between Garrard and Haertel, the inventor of the FTL drive, about various scientific and philosophical matters (how personality depends on environment, time flow, etc.). When Garrard volunteers to go out again on a new ship, Haertel refuses, saying that they need to work out why the beademung wanted him to come back to Earth.
This story has an intriguing gimmick at the beginning of the piece, and an interesting (if somewhat unintelligible) first contact situation after that. However, all this, and the dull talking heads section at the end, doesn’t really add up to anything, and you very much get the impression that the author was merely playing with a number of pet ideas as he went along.1
There are also a number of matters that don’t make much sense: (a) the interior temperature in the ship is noted as being 37° C, far too hot to be comfortable; (b) the reason he enters “pseudo death” isn’t explained (if time kept on speeding up in the last part of the journey it would appear as if he suddenly arrives at Alpha Centauri; (c) if ship time speeds up so rapidly your normal speed mind won’t be able to feed your body sufficiently, and you will starve to death during the ten month trip.
Those who like literary, or more ideational or philosophical stories, may get something out of this, but I suspect many will be perplexed.
** (Average). 8,150 words. Story link.

1. The story was commissioned by Robert A. Lowndes to accompany a previously painted cover:



The details of this commission are discussed in Robert Silverberg’s anthology, Science Fiction 101, where the he recounts what the cover suggested to Blish:

Blish, early in 1953, was handed a photostat of a painting that showed a draftsman’s compasses with their points extended to pierce two planets, one of them the Earth and the other a cratered globe that might have been the Moon. A line of yellow string also connected the two worlds. In the background were two star-charts and the swirling arms of a spiral nebula. Blish later recalled that the pair of planets and their connecting yellow string reminded him on some unconscious level of a pair of testicles and the vas deferens, which is the long tube through which sperm passes during the act of ejaculation. And out of that—by the tortuous and always mysterious process of manipulation of initial material that is the way stories come into being—he somehow conjured up the strange and unforgettable voyage of “Common Time,” which duly appeared as the cover story on the August, 1953, issue of Science Fiction Quarterly.  p. 282

If Blish were older at the time he would presumably have identified the exploding sun in the background as the prostate.
Silverberg adds:

I failed to notice, I ought to admit, anything in the story suggesting that it was about the passage of sperm through the vas deferens and onward to the uterus. To me in my innocence it was nothing more than an ingenious tale of the perils of faster-than-light travel between stars. Damon Knight, in a famous essay published in 1957, demonstrated that the voyage of the sperm was what the story was “really” about, extracting from it a long series of puns and other figures of speech that exemplified the underlying sexual symbolism of everything that happens: the repeated phrase “Don’t move” indicates the moment of orgasm, and so forth. Blish himself was fascinated by that interpretation of his story and added a host of embellishments to Knight’s theory in a subsequent letter to him. All of which called forth some hostility from other well-known science fiction writers, and for months a lively controversy ran through the s-f community. Lester del Rey, for example, had no use for any symbolist interpretations of fiction. “A story, after all, is not a guessing game,” del Rey said. “We write for entertainment, which means primarily for casual reading. Now even Knight has to pore through a story carefully and deliberately to get all the symbols, so we can’t really communicate readily and reliably by them. To the casual reader, the conscious material on the surface must be enough. Hence we have to construct a story to be a complete and satisfying thing, even without the symbols. . . . If we get off on a binge of writing symbols for our own satisfaction, there’s entirely too much temptation to feel that we don’t have to make our points explicitly, but to feel a smug glow of satisfaction in burying them so they only appear to those who look for symbols.”  pp. 282-283

Knight’s analysis of the sexual symbols in the story can be found—if, like him, you appear to have too much time on your hands—in Chapter 26 of In Search of Wonder.