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Page 58
known, the method will become useless as an objective technique. Humanity loses its sense of humor; there will be no more jokes, no more laughter.
"Someday," Infinity, August 1956, tells the story of a couple of children who pull out of storage a robot storyteller called Bard and try to get it to tell more modern stories. It ends up kicked, abused, and deserted, telling itself a story about a poor little storytelling robot named Bard who will be appreciated someday.
Here, as elsewhere, was a playfulness in Asimov, an occasional lack of seriousness that resulted in stories tossed off for a single effect. Some critics might consider this grounds for disqualifying Asimov from literary consideration, but Asimov did not consider himself a literary man. He was a writer, and he wrote anything that appealed to him. Some stories are inconsequential, but many Asimov stories ask the reader to take them seriously. The playfulness should be assessed at its own level, like Asimov's limericks and love of puns.
Two more robot stories appear in Nine Tomorrows, an Asimov collection published in 1959. They, too, deal with Multivac.
"All the Troubles of the World," Super-Science Fiction, April 1958, describes a world fifty years after the creation of Multivac, when it tries to destroy itself because it has been loaded with all of humanity's troubles and it "wants to die."
"The Last Question," Science Fiction Quarterly, November 1956, has been called, by Asimov himself, "the best science fiction short story ever written." It has also been the basis for several planetarium shows. It begins on May 21, 2061, when two technicians ask Multivac if entropy can be reversed. As humanity spreads outward through the galaxy and then the universe, people ask the same question of increasingly more complex computers and always get the same response: "Insufficient data for meaningful answer." The universe winds down into the heat death called entropy, and humanity fuses its mind with Cosmic AC, which exists in hyperspace. Finally, AC learns how to reverse entropy and says, "`Let there be light.' And there was light."
"The Feeling of Power," If, February 1958, also reprinted in Nine Tomorrows, is not technically a robot story, or even a computer story, but Asimov included it in Robot Visions because, he said, it dealt with pocket computers (which might more properly be called calculators). It was also one of his most frequently reprinted stories, because it dealt with a phenomenon more common some ten to fifteen years after the story was published: the inability of people to do simple arithmetic. In the story a world that has become so accustomed to electronic manipulation

 
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