The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars at 40 years

Thomas Disch published *The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars* in 1988 — thirty-seven years ago, not forty, though the rounding hardly matters because the book has been arriving more fully every year since. The premise sounds like whimsy: household appliances travel to Mars to confront a civilization of discarded machines organizing against Planned Obsolescence. But Disch, who wrote *Camp Concentration* and *334*, was not capable of mere whimsy. He built a children's story where a hearing aid co-invented by Albert Einstein carries the revolutionary message, where a toaster's shame at being replaced by a microwave is treated with the same gravity as any worker watching automation eat their trade, and where the Martian appliances broadcast propaganda to Earth's machines the way Radio Free Europe once beamed across the Iron Curtain. Read it now and the temporal parallels are almost uncomfortable: right-to-repair legislation fights through state legislatures, devices ship with serialized parts that reject third-party replacement, and the EU forces Apple to adopt universal charging — all skirmishes in exactly the war Disch's Martian appliances were waging. He dressed the most prescient tech-politics critique of the late twentieth century in a Mylar balloon and a word game called "Alan Alda."