Teaching SF and Future Society: The Dystopian World in A.I. and Super-Toys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time

Abstract

This essay intends to research and teach the dystopian world of Stephen Spielberg’s A.I.Artificial Intelligence (2001, hereafter A.I.) and Brian Aldiss’s Science Fiction, Super-Toys Last All Summer Long and Other Stories of Future Time (1969) on which A.I. is based. A.I. is based on the screen script of a ‘Pinocchio’s picaresque robot version’ by Ian Watson, a British science-fiction author, which was based on Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, Carlo Collodi’s Adventures of Pinocchio (1883), and Hans Moravec’s Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human (1988). A.I. includes Spielberg’s happy ending and family ideology. However, Kubrick’s influence is evident everywhere in the film: the family is the greatest horror when humans show their selfishness to non-humans. Gigolo Joe, an android robot, walks in his stride, who is more elegant and amoral than humans. In the Flesh Fair, robots are cruelly destroyed by humans. David in the amphibicopter has reached a deadlock with the statue of Blue Fairy. Above all, in the last scene of post-human beings, the revolved robots consider the ruins of humanity to be bleak. In this respect, the film A.I. represents a dystopian world based on Aldiss and Kubrick’s insight that Android goes beyond human beings in Spielberg’s family oriented film.