Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) is a highly prolific master of hard science fiction who not only came up with the famed “Three Laws of Robotics” but is himself often mentioned along with Arthur C. Clarke and Robert Heinlein as one of the “Big Three,” a term denoting the giants of early science fiction.
Asimov considered H. G. Wells, Clifford D. Simak, and John W. Campbell among those writers who influenced him and his work. He, in turn, was a great influence not just on other writers but in the field of science in general. For example, his New York Times essay in 1964 predicting what the world would be like in 2014 envisioned the importance of environmental issues in the future. His emphasis on population growth rather than climate change isn’t wrong so much as it emphasizes one major cause over effect.
Asimov’s most famous work is the Foundation series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series. The Galactic Empire novels are explicitly set in earlier history of the same fictional universe as the Foundation series. Later, beginning with Foundation’s Edge, he linked this distant future to the Robot and Spacer stories, creating a unified “future history” for his stories much like those created by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote hundreds of short stories, including the 1941 social science fiction story “Nightfall,” which in 1968 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.
Probably one of Asimov’s most influential themes was the Three Laws of Robotics. His theories of robotic principles continue to permeate today’s popular fiction, movies, television, and other media as well as the field of robotics in general.
“The Last Question” was first published in Science Fiction Quarterly in 1956. In this story Asimov imagines a universal computer system that has global reach and is faced with a single question related to human existence. Asimov considered this his best and favorite short story.