Wow. Just wow. I love McIntosh (in addition to Bridesicle, see also:
One Paper Airplane Graffito Love Note, run pre-Dave and Anna at PodCastle).
This was absolutely fun, no question about it. As people have mentioned, it made me think of Willy Wonka, video games like Zelda and Super Mario Brothers, the retro 70's vibe.
But what I loved most was that at the heart of this story, it was about collecting, and how in this world, only the rich can hope to collect, and how broken of a system that is.
You can read quite a bit into that. Samuel L. Jackson won't sell the guy at his comic shop a piece of art because the dude says he's going to give it to his kid. Also - the cool stuff - the stuff we really love, shouldn't be horded and hidden from everyone else. I guess you could even say that's Biblical (parable of the talents). The stories/talents don't belong to a certain class, they should be available to anyone who can find them, they should be shared. The more that's out there, the more exciting it all is. Hello, Escape Artists! (Yes, Scattercat, I realize I'm brining my own reading/experience to this, no doubt about it. I am totally fine with that.
)
I felt most let down by the final sentence. Why not "there were so many spheres out there to find, swap and share, and Jimmy wanted to every one of them. Gotta get 'em all."
Because, no offense, McIntosh did it better. Your sentence kind of flies in the face of everything this story is about. The spheres aren't meant to be controlled by one person, or even one class. When that happens, the spheres hit reset.
But, I would like to know why this world was stuck in the 70's; Partridge Family, sphere catelogues instead of databases, cashier's cheque instead of automatic money transfer, etc. I don't know why, but it kind of struck me as odd and needing some explanation.
It's set in the 70's so there's no Internet and you can't just Google "Midnight Blue" to find out what it does. Ha.
Ha. True, there's that. I think it was also set in the 70's because that makes it a different world than this one, and a 70's with Super Mario Easter Egg super powers is a very alien place for us today.
(I agree with the sentiment that the 70's aren't any more innocent than where we are now. It's the age of the kid himself/herself in any age that captures that innocence.)
Great pick, Mur, and a good reading by Paul.