Comment by foxit
14 years ago
This reminds me of a Fredric Brown short story I can't remember the name of in which an entity travelling through the galaxies encounters a planet upon which consciousnesses are, surprisingly, encased in finite bits of matter. There is matter, and there is consciousness, but never had this entity seen the two in some combination.
I don't know if there's a real "who came first" in speculative fiction, but I often think Brown's ideas were truly innovative. For instance, in his 1954 (very) short story "Answer", we see the basis for Skynet, and I've been as yet unable to find an earlier instance of this idea. http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
"Answer" is one of my favorites as well. Brown specialised in short shorts. Somewhere I have a collection of his where every other story is one of those. My favorite being, in it's entirety:
"The last man on Earth sat alone in a room; there was a knock on the door."
Interesting! Asimov's "The Last Question" came out two years later. The title and the content are so similar - I wonder if Asimov was familiar with "Answer".