| Supertoys Last All Summer Long: And Other Stories of Future Time | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Brian W. Aldiss |
| Original title | Supertoys Last All Summer Long |
| Country | England |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Science Fiction |
| Publisher | St. Martin's Griffin; Third Printing edition |
| Publication date | 2001-06-27 |
| Media type | Paperback |
| Pages | 256 pages |
| ISBN | 0312280610 |
| Dewey Decimal | 823/.914 21 |
| LC Classification | PR6051.L3 S86 2001b |
"Super-Toys Last All Summer Long" is a short story by British science fiction author Brian Aldiss, first published in 1969. The story deals with humanity in an age of intelligent machines, and of the aching loneliness endemic in an overpopulated future where child creation is controlled.
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The story has three principal characters: David, a preschool boy who struggles to express his feelings to his mother and ponders the question of what is real; his mother Monica Swinton, who struggles to endure the loneliness of her typically isolated lifestyle; and her husband Henry, who is involved in the development of intelligent robots that will be able to serve as social companions for humans. At the end, it is revealed that the couple have been waiting for permission to have a child; David is not a "real" boy.
It was the literary basis for the first act of the feature film A.I. Artificial Intelligence, which was an unrealized film project of Stanley Kubrick, posthumously developed and filmed by Steven Spielberg and released in 2001.
In 2001 the short story was re-published in the eponymous Aldiss short story collection Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, along with the tie-in stories "Super-Toys When Winter Comes" and "Super-Toys in Other Seasons." The collection also contained a number of stories not tied to the Super-Toys theme.[1]