Robot Dreams
This is a collection of short Asimov stories. "Little Lost Robot" (1947), a Robot story "Robot Dreams" (1986), a Robot story "Breeds There a Man...?" (1951) "Hostess" (1951) "Sally" (1953), a Robot story "Strikebreaker" (1957) "The Machine that Won the War" (1961), a Multivac story "Eyes Do More Than See" (1965) "The Martian Way" (1952) "Franchise" (1955), a Multivac story "Jokester" (1956), a Multivac story "The Last Question" (1956), a Multivac story "Does a Bee Care?" (1957) "Light Verse" (1973), a Robot story "The Feeling of Power" (1958) "Spell My Name with an S" (1958) "The Ugly Little Boy" (1958) "The Billiard Ball" (1967) "True Love" (1977), a Multivac story "The Last Answer" (1980) "Lest We Remember" (1982)
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What Hacker News says
- 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.
- interestingly enough, there is a FAQ entry for this which goes like
"""
There's this really neat story by Asimov, but I can't remember the title...
The story is probably "The Last Question". It can be found in a number of Asimov's anthologies (it was his favorite of his own stories, after all): Nine Tomorrows Opus 100 The Best of Isaac Asimov The Best Science Fiction of Isaac Asimov Robot Dreams The Complete Stories, volume 1 The Asimov Chronicles It is also found in a number of anthologies not consisting entirely of stories by Asimov.
There is a mathematical possibility that you're thinking of a story other than "The Last Question", but it's very slight. Asimov's own experience was that if someone couldn't remember the title of one of his stories (and especially if they weren't entirely sure if it was by him), then it was "The Last Question."
But just in case, here are some of the stories with titles that often aren't remembered as well as the plot:
* "The Last Question" concerns the fate of the universe, when a computer is asked several times through the ages if entropy can ever be reversed.
* "The Feeling of Power" describes a time in the future, when a young man amazes everyone with his ability to perform mathematical computations in his head, instead of relying on computers like everyone else does.
* "Profession" is about a boy who is brought to a house for the feeble-minded after tests show that he is abnormal, because unlike the others, who are all educated by machines and have their professions chosen for them, he is capable of original thinking.
"""
(it is also my favorite story, FWIW)
