You’re right, it was Time Enough At Last. Thinking of the lines Meredith says before, ‘it’s not fair!’ Nah, you’re right, the story doesn’t belong. Put that vote instead towards mbh’s contribution of Clarke’s novelization of 2001.
More sci-fi: the last line of Iain Banks’s Surface Detail is amazing. Not for its literary quality, but for how it changes your view of several characters in the Culture series.
Clarke did have a knack for giving the reader a gut-punch at the end of a story. See also “The Star”, though that one, one might at least have seen coming.
And no big thing if some posters are quoting the last lines, as long as the surprise endings aren’t completely spoiled. I’m looking forward to reading all the suggested stories, my summer reading list just got a lot more interesting, and a lot longer!
I had all three volumes when I was a teenager and I read them at least a couple times each. I can’t recall whether The Cold Equations was in one of them, but that’s got a hell of a final line as well.
There are a lot of Fredric Brown stories that fit – Brown was a master of the short-short, and had lots of stories with twists or puns at the end, in addition to a lot of more serious stuff.
His story “Knock” has the same line at the beginning and at the end, but the meaning are completely different.
I concede Stephen King horror stories aren’t hardcore SF, but the last line of, “Pet Semetary,” and the last line of, “Survivor Type,” (short story) both gave me the willies.
The two I immediatly thought of have been mentioned above (A boy and his dog, The Nine Billion Names of God), but by chance I just watched “Predestination” (2014), which is based on “—All You Zombies—” by Robert A. Heinlein.
I could be wrong about the last line – a movie has to be less dialog driven – but I remember a last line, and that would be the third one.