Name: Love minus eighty
ISBN: 9780316217781

Will McIntosh

"In the future, love is complicated and death is not necessarily the end. Love Minus Eighty follows several interconnected people in a disquieting vision of romantic life in the century to come"--Amazon.

Love minus eighty

Ken Gagne

A well-written book with believable characters — I just didn't find the plot very gripping, with too many unanswered questions about how we came to be in this fictional future in the first place.

Heather Killeen

I'm giving this 4* but really it's closer to 3.5. I think the premise of this story is pretty interesting. McIntosh shows us a world and citizenship that is completely connected via technology but then really shows the impact of that interconnectedness through a handful of different characters. Although they are all introduced as being on fairly separate paths, it becomes apparent early on that all their paths would eventually merge. Unfortunately, they way they merge is pretty unsurprising and the resolutions at the end were also fairly expected. I did like the non-traditional love stories that develop throughout the novel, but I never felt like I could really strongly relate to any of the characters. I think this was because their personalities and choices were too different from my own, rather than something McIntosh did intentionally, but maybe I'm wrong. 

I'm leaning towards 4* rather than 3* because despite these faults, I found it compelling to be in the world he created. Instead of showing one way of life in a tech charged world, he showed a kaleidoscope of life: the ways of the very rich, the very poor, and the in-between. There were characters that were broadcasting their every move to thousands of viewers (think reality TV on steroids), but also we saw the raw-lifers who shun all technology and live off the land away from the buzzing, multi-tiered cities. 

Other than the technology aspects of the story, the other main focus is obviously cryopreservation and resurrection. Although I don't think it likely our society would ever adopt a program where beautiful women who die young can be cryopreserved and then "bought" as wives by the insanely rich, I still thought it was interesting to contemplate how this society came to the point where this business practice was put in place and ultimately how it caused turmoil. McIntosh doesn't really go into how it became an accepted practice, but he does let us consider what it means to live and to die in a whole new light.

Anna Pinto

Great worldbuilding! The plot was a little over the place sometimes.

In the future, love is complicated and death is not necessarily the end. Love Minus Eighty follows several interconnected people in a disquieting vision of romantic life in the century to come. There's Rob, who accidentally kills a jogger, then sacrifices all to visit her in a cryogenic dating facility, seeking forgiveness but instead falling in love. Veronika, a shy dating coach, finds herself coaching the very woman who is stealing the man she loves. And Mira, a gay woman accidentally placed in a heterosexual dating center near its inception, desperately seeks a way to reunite with her frozen partner as the years pass. In this daring and big-hearted novel based on the Hugo-winning short story, the lovelorn navigate a world in which technology has reached the outer limits of morality and romance.