Supertoys When Winter Comes

Aldiss, Brian W. "Supertoys When Winter Comes." First published Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of the Future. New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 2001. For publication updates, see http://www.brianwaldiss.com.

Sequel to "Supertoys Last All Summer Long," second in a trilogy (so far) ending with "Supertoys in Other Seasons." See for the "Ambient" as a kind of Internet system, with hints of E.M. Forster's communications devices in "The Machine Stops." Note "Mummy's" saying explicitly of the robot boy (David) and supertoy Teddy, "You'll never grow up" (16); cf. and contrast Harlan Ellison's "Jeffty Is Five" (1977; coll. Dick Allen, Science Fiction: The Future, 2nd ed.). Most centrally "SYWC" develops the question of the "reality" of David and Teddy: with the "death" of the serving-man robot Jules, David's taking apart much of Teddy, David's cracking his own face, and David attacking "the house's control centre," causing much of the hologram house to disappear (19-21). Holding "a sickly rose" (unlike Mummy's perfect roses [9]), David stands "Over her [dead] body" and says, to end the story, "I am human, Mummy. I love you and I feel sad just like real people, so I must be human . . . Mustn't I?" (22). Cf. and definitely contrast ending of Ellison's "Jeffty," where what spin-doctors might call an electrical event leaves the child dead and the parents, in one sense, free. (RDE, 11/07/01)