In one sentence
The story treats the desire to overcome entropy as both humanity’s defining intellectual ambition and a disguised confrontation with mortality. Its recurring question survives changes in bodies, civilizations, and computers, suggesting that curiosity—and the search for an ultimate answer—may outlast the individual human being.
Overview
First published in Science Fiction Quarterly in November 1956 and later collected in Nine Tomorrows, the story is organized as a sequence of episodes spanning from the near future into the remote life and death of the cosmos. Each episode revisits the same problem through a more advanced successor to Multivac.
Core ideas
Entropy as cosmic mortality
The scientific question about reversing entropy also functions as a question about death: whether decline is merely inevitable or potentially intelligible and reversible. Asimov turns a thermodynamic concept into an existential crisis.
The persistence of the question
The wording and concern recur across radically transformed eras. This repetition gives the story its structure and implies continuity between ordinary human anxiety, civilization-scale planning, and posthuman intelligence.
Technology as successor and custodian
Computers are not simply tools. They become interpreters of human purposes, repositories of knowledge, and increasingly independent agents. The story is optimistic about intelligence while remaining attentive to humanity’s eventual dependence on its creations.
Scale and narrative compression
Asimov compresses billions or trillions of years into brief conversational scenes. The abrupt jumps make individual lives feel temporary, while the repeated pattern creates a sense of cosmic history as one long inquiry.
Science and religious resonance
Although the story’s language is rooted in science, its structure evokes creation, apocalypse, revelation, and rebirth. The ending invites theological interpretation, but it can also be read as a speculative thought experiment about intelligence reaching its final limits.
A tension in Asimov’s optimism
The story imagines progress continuing beyond ordinary biological humanity, yet its central problem remains emotionally human: fear of extinction. Its confidence in reason does not eliminate wonder or vulnerability.
Practical takeaways
- When revisiting the story, distinguish the literal physics question from the emotional question underneath it: what would it mean to outlast death?
- Notice how each new computer changes the meaning of “humanity” without making the original concern disappear.
- The repeated refusal to provide an immediate answer is structurally important: knowledge can advance enormously while ultimate uncertainty remains.
- Read the story’s cosmic scale against its intimate beginnings; the contrast is what makes the later developments feel both grand and unsettling.
- The story is especially useful for thinking about whether technological continuity would count as human survival, or merely as the preservation of human purposes.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The story’s treatment of entropy is speculative and poetic rather than a detailed account of modern cosmology; its scientific premise serves a philosophical design.
- Its technological optimism reflects the mid-century science-fiction tradition and can feel less attentive to politics, inequality, embodiment, and ecological limits than contemporary fiction.
- Interpretations differ on whether the conclusion is religious, humanist, posthumanist, or primarily a formal act of symmetry. The text supports resonance among these readings without settling the issue.
- The supplied catalogue description is unrelated to this work: it describes a bibliographic guide, not Asimov’s short story.
Questions worth revisiting
- Is reversing entropy a genuine scientific problem in the story, or a symbolic version of humanity’s wish to defeat death?
- If intelligence survives by changing beyond biology, what—if anything—must remain for it to still be called human?
- Does the story ultimately celebrate progress, or expose progress as an endless postponement of mortality?
- Why does Asimov present the central question repeatedly through dialogue rather than through a single explanatory narrator?
- Does an answer have value if no original questioner remains to receive it?
Return to this when…
Return to this story when thinking about entropy, artificial intelligence, posthuman identity, or the literary use of vast time scales. It is also worth rereading alongside Asimov’s other Multivac stories and contrasting its faith in cumulative intelligence with more skeptical AI fiction.