A goodreads.com reviewer aptly describes Answer by Fredric Brown as one of the most concise SciFi horror stories I have ever read. There are eerie similarities between the new supercomputer’s response to the first question asked of it in this story and the final sentence of Isaac Asimov’s The Last Question. Both stories were published in the mid-1950s and reflect concerns about the future influence of computers on society. An interesting observation on some other websites is that Brown’s one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies is already here… it’s called the Internet!
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