Universal Love

December 23, 2019
Set in the near future, Weinstein’s troubling and compassionate collection (after Children of the New World) imagines some dire ramifications of social media and robotics. In the sweetly comic “The Year of Nostalgia,” a dead woman returns in the form of a hologram, complete with memories and personality traits assembled from her social media accounts and diaries. Leah, the reanimated woman’s daughter, discovers a more adventurous, free-spirited version of her mother than the Midwestern housewife she remembered, since the hologram has been programmed to act on her desires for travel and romance. The portentous “Beijing,” set in a future version of the city so polluted that it’s only possible to navigate by stopping at stations that dispense breathable air, follows a gay American expatriate whose lover has become addicted to having his memories removed through microsurgeries, leaving the men’s relationship suspended in the present. In the chilling “Childhood,” the robot “son” of a suburban couple observes his older robot sister becoming addicted to illicitly smoking her “emotion card” through a glass pipe. Though some of the stories lean on intriguing concepts without developing complete narratives, the collection convincingly explores many potential effects of social engineering. Channeling Ray Bradbury with contemporary allegories, Weinstein will make readers think twice about their relationship to technology.

January 15, 2020
Eleven new stories about our potentially weird future. Weinstein (Children of the New World, 2016) made a big splash in SF with his debut collection and follows it up with nearly a dozen stories that are just as creepy and will fit right in if you're watching Black Mirror. The opener, "The Year of Nostalgia," comes especially close to that particular flavor; it concerns a family trying to deal with grief by interacting with their hologram relatives. In "Beijing," we find people living in the last days of the climate crisis erasing unpleasant memories of the things that hurt them most. "Comfort Porn" takes the concept of Tinder and similar apps to an unpleasant destination. Really, it's all a prescient warning about technology, not that we really need a warning at this point. In "We Only Wanted Their Happiness," indulgent parents give their kids access to information that turns them into little monsters. "True Love Testimonials" is, yes, a little weird, with its post-Tinder confessions about how to hook up with, say, a guy you can make look like your ex, or hosting "morphing orgies." Things get stranger. In "Childhood," the kids...malfunction, and we'll leave it at that. Inevitably, in "Sanctuary," we discover aliens, but in the most unusual and dangerous place imaginable. Time travel? Sure, why not? In "Infinite Realities," we meet someone trying to find the version where they get it right, for once. We're running out of time, so to speak, but there's something to say about abandonment in "Mountain Song" and, finally, another dry look at the end times in "Islanders." In dark times, we get entertainment that reflects the world we've made. Welcome home.

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November 15, 2019
A company named Nostalgia can bring a deceased loved one back to some semblance of life as a companionable hologram. In severely polluted Beijing, nightclub neurotechnicians eradicate painful memories, making patching the new clubbing drug. In New York, a lonely young woman in a ruthlessly transactional culture watches comfort porn, video clips of people who seem genuinely happy to see her. A digital war game has real-life consequences. Family bonds are complicated when parents raise robot children and "chipped" human children navigate a constant data stream. Giant insects crash into immersive virtual realities, and a despairing programmer ventures into a parallel universe where he and his lover are still happy together. In his second provocative collection of incisively imagined and profoundly disquieting speculative short stories, following Children of the New World (2016), Weinstein dramatizes the perils of an AI-ruled near-future. In these plangent and mind-bending cautionary tales of digital intrusion and environmental devastation, human emotions remain essentially the same as everything else changes and people struggle to find love and meaning in a pillaged, monitored, commodified, and harshly inhospitable world of our own devising.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)