Customer Reviews

Supertoys Last All Summer Long

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

That said, the three Supertoy stories are here, and are quite nice. I think some of the imagery in the three are superior to that of the movie, the first in particular (Monica's response to being allowed to breed is incredible). However, there is much more to this book than just Supertoys.

To start off Aldiss apparently hates humanity, or at the very least human vanity and self-centeredness. He also seems to think that humankind will not grow out of these flaws, instead humanity will become more and more self-centered as time goes on, so be prepared for a future that is at the same time utopia and distopia...

Aldiss's writing style does seem to swing between brilliant and not so good, but there is enough brilliant to make up for the rest. III was particularly grim (the image of what humanity does to the inhabitants of Triton will stick with you), and "A Matter of Mathematics" could possibly be made into a decent screenplay. All told, "Supertoys..." is an incredible collection of eerily plausible sci-fi that just about everyone should read once, if not more. (if just to avoid turning the inhabitants of Jupiter's moon Europa into Campbell's Canned ET)

The first three stories have obvious parallels (which Aldiss apparently denied) with Pinnochio (and also the Tin Man in Wizard of Oz and Pygmalion and seal-wife and fairy-wife legends). Maybe I'm reading too much into this (making me guilty of deconstructionism) but I saw a pattern of recreation of old stories. "Nothing in Life is Ever Enough" tells the story of Shakespeares "Tempest" from Caliban's angle. "The Old Mythology" is what its title suggests; a visitor from a future age is present at events (told with a sharp sense of humor) that precapitulate (if that's a word) Greek and Hebrew creation myths. "Headless" is a version of the sacrificed hero described in Fraser's "Golden Bough." "A Matter of Mathematics" is about Plato's cave. In "Becoming the Full Butterfly" the breaking of a divine law results in the destruction of a world by flooding. "Talking Cubes"= "The Picture of Dorian Grey." "Steppenpferd"=the Temptation of St Anthony (I couldn't make a connection to Hesse's "Steppenwolf").
Most of the stories have down-beat endings. Whenever anybody has a good time they get their come-uppance, so it's a pessimistic view of the future. Even "The Marvels of Utopia" is dystopic - at least it's far from Thomas More. In spite of they're enjoyable because of Aldiss's sheer good writing,excellent jokes, wild imagination and page-turning action.I

I bought this book based on the connection to the movie A.I. I am always interested in how a science fiction story or novel has been converted to the screen. I was suprised to find that all the stories except for the cover title were written recently, rather than in the time period of Supertoys, which was 1969. I have read a little Aldiss over the years and find him an OK science fiction writer with novels like Helliconia Summer. I thought the other two Supertoys stories, while written 25 years after the original, did a good job of keeping the tone of the original, they just weren't that interesting. The remaining stories were not enjoyable to me at all and I finally gave up without finishing the book.

Brian Aldiss knows how to envelop you in a story. He doesn't waste time on descriptions of people or places, but just gives you the characters and their situation and goes from there. Some of the stories are just descriptions of a future corporation's plans or a strange occurance. But most become epic in meaning by the time you hit the end of the story. One thing that might bother some readers is the way some of the stories seem to go on and on and on and nothing is really happening. Don't let it get to you because at the end of each story the REAL meaning is shown and it makes total sense. You'll be reading one of the stories thinking you know what's going to happen, but you never do with Aldiss. As far as the Supertoys/A.I. stories they are among the weakest of the collection and are almost totally different from the movie. No Gigolo Joe, No Rouge City, NO BLUE FAIRY. Just David, Monica, a completely different Henry, Professor Hobby, and of course, Teddy. Aldiss is truly a master of Sci/Fi and somehow his bleek view of the future seems eerily possible...

Without question, Brian Aldiss is a good writer, capable of writing memorable tales such as his "Supertoys" trilogy. However, this uneven collection doesn't quite rise to the high literary standards I've expected from fellow British science fiction writers J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock. Only "III" and "A Matter of Mathematics" are as finely wrought as "Supertoys Last All Summer Long". If you have a taste for robots, you might be better off reading Asimov, though the first "Supertoys" tale is among the finest I have read about androids and robots. And frankly, I didn't find Aldiss' space tales as engrossing as any I have read by Arthut C. Clarke. Still, Aldiss' work deserves a broad readership and those unfamiliar with his oeuvre may find this slender tome an excellent introduction.

I shelled out [price] for this book because I wanted to read the title story, which inspired the movie “A.I.”, and its two sequels, which formed an outline of how Aldiss wanted the screenplay to evolve. In the three stories, Aldiss poses two good questions: “Can robots feel love?” and “If so, are they human?”, but he never gives us satisfactory answers. Throughout the trilogy, David remains a static, unchanging little boy incapable of articulating or learning from his experiences. The only character the audience can empathize and grow with is the aging, philandering father, who learns nothing in the end except that greed can ruin your life. The worst thing about these stories, though, is that they fail to cover any new ideas that have not already been discussed before, most notably by Isaac Asimov’s far superior “Bicentennial Man”.

The sixteen short stories that follow are much, much worse. Most of them teeter on the edge between dramatic fiction and satire, so that they are neither interesting nor funny. Only “Apogee Again” contains any imaginative ideas and descriptions. Some of the stories, such as “A Whiter Mars” and “Cognitive Ability and the Light Bulb”, are not really stories at all; they are summary descriptions of how society will evolve into a vegetarian, religion-less utopia. Others, such as “Dark Society” and “Steppenpferd”, start out promising but leave the reader with lady-or-the-tiger endings, without any resolution to the conflict.

Please, please don’t waste your money on this collection.

The supertoy story is quite different from the film, but I still love it because it gives another angle to see what happens to the the supertoy. In actual fact, I love this more than the film. However, the rest of the stories are horrible. Maybe the author want to espress his worries and negative views about the future of human life. However, he kept repeating the same idea all over the other stories, which really makes me fall asleep. Some of them I think they are NOT stories but simply author's theories about future and the bad sides of human beings. Sometimes it is really hard to understand what the writer want to say. In my point of view, the publisher just put all those stories together and make a BOOK to sell. Only the few pages about the supertoy is worth to read.

Way back in the mid-1970s director Stanley Kubrick was looking for a new project and ran across Brian Aldiss' short story, 'Supertoys Last All Summer Long', in which a childless couple create their own android son, who tries to understand if he is real or not. Kubrick was moved by the story and started trying to mould it into a film with Aldiss' help. Their work on the project went on for more than a decade (including the full gestation periods for Kubrick's movies The Shining and Full Metal Jacket) before Aldiss eventually left, exhausted by Kubrick's demanding work schedule and his insistence on drawing parallels to Pinocchio that Aldiss had never intended. Kubrick died in 1999 and Stephen Spielberg picked up the project, released it as the moderately successful A.I. in 2001. Aldiss sold several additional ideas to Spielberg which made it into the movie, and expanded these ideas into two sequels to the original short story.

The short story collection Supertoys Last All Summer Long and Other Tales of Future Time was released in 2001 to tie in with the film's release. As well as the original 1969 short story, it features the two sequels: 'Supertoys When Winter Comes' and 'Supertoys in Other Seasons'. These very short stories (each is 2,000 words or less) depict the story of David, an android who is created for a childless couple, but whose quest for self-identity proves problematic and he eventually leaves to wander the city. These stories are masterfully economical, transmitting much of the same story and concepts as the movie with Spielberg's sugar-coated schmaltz and Kubrick's worrying Blue Fairy fixation removed in a very small number of pages. You can read all three in considerably less than a single lunch break, as compared to the movie's sometimes bum-numbing two-hour running time.

Obviously, 6,000 words do not make a full collection, so an additional sixteen stories are included. They are united by the themes of dislocation and loneliness, which are approached from different angles. Many of the stories are ambiguous and few have any solid resolution. Aldiss' goal here is to raise issues and questions and see what the reader makes of them, not provide pat answers. Interestingly many of the stories are prototypes or condensed versions of other stories he has written: the lengthy seasonal cycle of 'Apogee Again' feels like Aldiss' epic Helliconia Trilogy on extreme fast-forward, whilst 'A Whiter Mars' is a direct tie-in to his stand-alone SF novel, White Mars. Some of the stories are obvious - 'III' is a simple commentary on humanity's fixation of exploiting natural resources, whilst 'Dark Society's twist ending will likely be spotted by experienced genre readers but remains haunting nonetheless - but others are more inventive, such as the Lord of Light-esque 'Becoming the Full Butterfly' and the judgmental 'Galaxy Zee'.

This is a fine collection of stories reflecting Aldiss' impressive writing range. There is a feeling of distance and coldness in many of the works - possibly an attraction for the likewise non-sentimental Kubrick (Blue Fairy obsession aside) - which may be offputting for some, but overall this is an intelligent and thought-provoking book and well worth seeking out.

Supertoys Last All Summer Long (***½) is published in the UK by Orbit (out of print but copies seem available on Amazon) and by St. Martin's Griffin in the USA.

Like many here, I found this book because of the connection to the film A.I. However, even though the film itself had it's own flaws, the story it was based on was lacking itself: no obstacles, albeit potentially interesting characters, and not a very satisfying conclusion...having me asking "And...?"

"Supertoys Last All Summer Long," the lead story, was followed by two other sequels in the same book, but they also don't really have anything to say, no characters to latch onto, and no satisfying conclusions. Unfortunately, this basically describes the stories in the book overall.

Writing short stories is difficult: Having a beginning, middle, end...and feel "done;" and, as aforementioned, having characters that we as readers find interesting and remember. However, the stories in this book read as if they were ideas that still needed developing.

The movie is "loosely" based on the book. It does not even share the title. the movie was great but should never be compared with the book. They are basically two different stories on two different types of media.