A few weeks ago, I found an online copy
of my favourite Asimov, one I think of as
the
ultimate
computer story. Ken
Kahn
mailed me to point out an earlier
ultimate-computer story: John
Campbell’s
The
Last Evolution, published
in
Amazing
Stories for August 1932.
and available now from
Project
Gutenberg.

I feel a wistfulness
about its closing paragraphs, similar to that in
two other
Campbell stories, Twilight
and Night.
These also feature wonderful computers.
Night tells of an anti-gravity
test flight which goes awry, flinging its
test pilot into a future long
after mankind has died out. But Man’s machines survive,
and the pilot visits them in
their neon-lit city on Neptune. Neon-lit; and
amongst the cold light,
are there drifts of neon on the ground?
The story’s
wistful mood arises partly because
despite their
great intelligence, these
machines lack (if I remember
correctly) one essential attribute — I
shan’t reveal what in case I spoil
the story.

Night doesn’t seem to exist
online, but
I did find a
review
on Jason Ellis’s Dynamic
Subspace site. As for Twilight,
there’s supposedly a copy
at http://www.naderlibrary.com/eiseley.twilight.johnstuartcampbell.htm,
but the server is down today: try
Google’s
cache.
I first read both stories in Tandem’s collection
The
Thing from Outer Space, and suspected then
that they came from the same future history.
In Twilight, Man still lives. So do his
machines. But so far into the future is it, that
more time has elapsed since their creation
than between me and a
flint axe. The stars have moved; dogs have evolved,
become intelligent, died out.
And in the same way that science-spurning teenagers
prod their pink iPods and their Facebook phones:

all those people knew was that to do a certain thing to a certain
lever produced certain results. Just as men in the Middle Ages knew
that to take a certain material, wood, and place it in contact with
other pieces of wood heated red, would cause the wood to disappear,
and become heat. They did not understand that wood was being oxidized
with the release of the heat of formation of carbon dioxide and water.
So those people did not understand the
things that fed and clothed and carried them.

Twilight was
declared by the Science
Fiction Writers of America to be one of the best science fiction
short stories of all time.

Written
for Dr. Dobbs