This one started when, a few months ago, I started thinking about toys and toymakers. A long time ago, more than a century, toys used to be something that anyone could build and amuse a child with. Well, anyone who could carve wood and do a little painting, at least. Now you have to be a software engineer and materials specialist with advanced degrees in physics to create the toys that line the shelves of Kay-Bees or Toys ‘R’ Us. Heck, even cars used to be built in a way that let any teenager with a bunch of tools and a spare weekend rebuild their carburetor. Now you need an advanced degree just to work on your car, and you can’t just take it to your local garage if what it needs is a software reboot. Even our vacuum cleaner started acting weird a few months ago because it needed to have its software upgraded.
Now, I don’t have anything against technology. I’m a web developer, after all, and my media player packs over a hundred albums and about a dozen movies on a device not much larger than a credit card. I love living in the future, and I don’t think that, short of a civilization-destroying calamity or a global “back to simpler times” movement enforced with violent weaponry, we will ever get back to a society where a guy could pick up a block of wood and a carving knife and create a line of toys that would amuse a crowd of children
So I got to thinking: what would it take to have a world where building sophisticated toys, complete with moving parts and low-level artificial intelligence, could be made by anyone who wanted to, without having to have advanced degrees or purchase expensive tools and components. I suppose you could have a magic system like that, but I didn’t want a magic system; I wanted something that work more like the technology that we understand, or that at least we could conceive of.
Every novel or story is, as one writer whose name eludes me put it, the wreck of a beautiful idea. This is the wreck that emerged from the idea I just described above.
“The Revisioned” is the longest and the most ambitious of the stories I’ve written for my “Story of the Week” project. It’s also a very different tone, I think, from what I usually write; it’s not comedic, it’s not goofy. It deals with some dark themes — or at least with some dim themes — and there’s not a zombie to be found. It’s also the first one I showed to some friends of mine for criticism before posting it here. Its length, at close to eight thousand words, may turn some of my readers off, but I hope you will enjoy it.
If you have any comments or criticims or compliments, I would really appreciate them.
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Current Mood: 
accomplished
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