Comment by a_shovel
3 hours ago
The paragraph about the stove making dozens of breakfasts as the house collapses at the climax of the story is what always stuck with me most. It would take a better writer than me to say why it works so well, I just know it does.
What do you do with an impossible situation? You do what you can. This maniacal robot stove somehow evokes a sense of desperation we can instinctively empathize with. A fiction of an intelligent machine, facing doom, deserving of pity. Or at least I like that idea better than just some mundane physical explanation.