The Brave Little Toaster is a 1980 novella by American writer Thomas M. Disch intended for children or, as put by the author, a "bedtime story for small appliances". The story centers on a group of five household appliances—a tensor lamp stand, an electric blanket, an AM radio alarm clock, a vacuum cleaner and a toaster—on their quest to find their original owner referred to as the Master.
Plot summary The story opens with a description of five members of a family of minor home appliances left in the cottage, listed from oldest to youngest. They are each given a personality. As the oldest, the vacuum cleaner is steady and dependable, the plastic AM radio alarm clock, the yellow electric blanket (cheerful), the tensor lamp stand (somewhat neurotic whether it, as an incentive from a savings bank, was better than a store-bought equivalent) and the Sunbeam toaster (bright). The cottage itself is on the northernmost edge of an immense forest and the appliances have grown used to seasonal use, with some of the master's other appliances (such as the black and white television set, the blender, the oral irrigator, the telephone, the stereo system and the world clock) annually returning to the city with their master each Labor Day. One spring day, after "two years, five months, and thirteen days" without the master, though, the appliances begin to suspect they have been abandoned. A few months later, the toaster tells the others "We need people to take care of, and we need people to take care of us" and retells the story of an abandoned dog who had accidentally been left behind in a summer cottage, like themselves, but still "found his way to his master, hundreds of miles away". The appliances plan to do the same as soon as they can all travel safely together. Although the Hoover, while being strong and self-propelled, could take the other appliances, it still needed a source of power other than the wall outlet.
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