The short story Super Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian W Aldiss was first published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1969, and subsequently appeared in the Brian Aldiss short story collection, The Moment of Eclipse. It describes a future where the world is overpopulated, and people live in vast cities above the ground. The government controls breeding: couples enter a lottery, and if they win, they get to breed.

Nobody has windows. Instead, they have a “whologram” that provides a pleasant setting such as a peaceful garden. Anyway, with the scarcity of breeding opportunities, technology has managed to find a solution for the yearning that many couples have for a child: artificial intelligence has developed to the point that people can have a robotic child (as a substitute for the real thing) and toys can behave as intelligently as humans.

The story is about one family that has a robot child, David, who cannot speak, but writes incomplete love notes to his mother. The humans assume that there is some kind of programming malfunction, but they might draw a different conclusion if they were to listen to David’s conversations with his teddy bear.

The story so entranced Stanley Kubrick that for years he worked towards making a movie of it, collaborating on two separate occasions with Aldiss. He also tried working with Arthur C Clarke. After he died, Steven Spielberg took the project on, and made the movie AI: Artificial Intelligence.

You can read the original story in the Wired archive.