Amazon.com Review
Blame it on taxes. According to SFWA Grand Master Brian Aldiss, that's the main reason he sold the movie rights to the Pinocchio-android tale "Supertoys Last All Summer Long" to Stanley Kubrick back in 1982. Bound here along with two followup short stories and nine unrelated short pieces from more recent years, "Supertoys" was to be the source material for Kubrick's last movie. Of course, Kubrick died, and then Steven Spielberg inherited the rights, intending to follow through on Kubrick's original vision.
In fairness, Aldiss has never seen his original story--nor the two pieces added later, "Supertoys When Winter Comes" and "Supertoys in Other Seasons"--as a Pinocchio fable at all. As he recounts in the wry, revealing foreword to this collection, "I could not or would not see the parallels between David, my five-year-old android, and the wooden creature who becomes human.... Never consciously rewrite old fairy stories." But the interpretation of the stubbornly eccentric Kubrick prevailed until Aldiss was "wheeled out of the picture."
These three excellent stories occupy just the first 35 pages of this compilation, but they accurately capture one of the great voices of British SF at his prime, with a plaintive, thoughtfully nuanced story about existence and the meaning of being human. The remaining tales range from intriguing to distractingly strident to borderline mawkish, but make no mistake about what's the main attraction here. In fact, the foreword alone, with Kubrick exposed at his curmudgeonly worst ("[To Aldiss:] You seem to have two modes of writing--brilliant and not so damned good"), makes this a collection worth picking up. --Paul Hughes
From Publishers Weekly
The title story of this collection a 1969 vignette about a boy-robot who wants to be real captured the imagination of Stanley Kubrick, though the acclaimed director never managed to expand it into a feature-length motion picture. Two additional vignettes by SF Grand Master Aldiss 30 years later "Supertoys in Other Seasons" and "Supertoys When Winter Comes" flesh out something of a story line, which has become the basis of Steven Spielberg's probable summer blockbuster, AI. Many of the other pieces here also remain at the vignette level, merely presenting ideas rather than creating stories. "Apogee Again" and "Becoming the Full Butterfly" offer settings where sex becomes a metaphor for survival. "Beef," "A Matter of Mathematics" and "Cognitive Ability and the Light Bulb," like the speechified "III," extrapolate the eventual failure of humanity's attempts to grow and expand to other worlds without harming them. "Marvells of Utopia," "The Pause Button" and the Socratic dialogue of "A Whiter Mars" all examine different versions of Utopia, each a society that has sacrificed some basic human value in order to achieve qualified perfection. The search for a better life through time travel likewise reveals predictable results in "The Old Mythology," while "Headless" delivers heavy-handed points on crime and punishment. This collection is a mixed bag of scenes and cold, distantly told stories showcasing the author's biting sarcasm and apparent lack of hope for humanity's future. (June 27)Forecast: With Spielberg's AI due for July release, sales of this tie-in book are certain to go into orbit.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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