Ask a Foolish Question

On a distant planet, an all-knowing machine called Answerer waits for the one question it can truly answer. When Morran, a young physicist chasing cosmic truth, and Lingman, an aging biologist driven by the mysteries of life and death, arrive, they find that absolute knowledge may be useless if no one can frame the right inquiry. Wry, inventive, and philosophically sharp, the story turns humanity's hunger for understanding into a comedy of limits. As more seekers gather—each from a strange race with its own fixation, from purple to the rule of eighteen to the nature of stars—their questions expose how every species is trapped by its own assumptions. Lek, a confident voice among them, fails as well, because even brilliance cannot overcome a flawed question. When Morran and Lingman finally confront Answerer, they discover that the machine's frustration mirrors their own: it knows everything, yet can only respond to valid thought. The result is a playful meditation on perception, language, and the tragicomic gap between knowing and asking. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.