#8 in Classics

The Last Question

Name: The Last Question
Author: Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov

First published 1956Original language EN

8.7

Score out of 10309 ratingsConfidence 68%: this much of the score is the readers’ own

#8 of 200 in Classics ahead of 96% of the category

Part of a seriesMultivac15 volumes

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Our view

“The Last Question” is a very short story with a very large reach. One question about entropy is asked again and again as humanity spreads across the universe, and some readers single out the close, while finding the repeated episodes a little long for what that ending needs and the technical explanations hard to picture. It can be read in under an hour.

The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.

About the book

"The Last Question" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It first appeared in the November 1956 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly; and in the anthologies in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973), Robot Dreams (1986), The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov (1986), the retrospective Opus 100 (1969), and Isaac Asimov: The Complete Stories, Vol. 1 (1990). While he also considered it one of his best works, "The Last Question" was Asimov's favorite short story of his own authorship, and is one of a loosely connected series of stories concerning a fictional computer called Multivac. Through successive generations, humanity questions Multivac on the subject of entropy.

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Reading order · Multivac

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Where the score comes from

The sources average 9.1 across 309 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 68% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Classics average of 7.7. That is how 8.7 comes out.