Name: Bee's review of Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein
Item: Children of the New World
Rating: 3
Author: Bee

Alexander Weinstein

AN EXTRAORDINARILY RESONANT AND PROPHETIC COLLECTION OF SPECULATIVE SHORT FICTION FOR OUR TECH-SAVVY ERA BY DEBUT AUTHOR ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago. In “The Cartographers,” the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how real a son he has become. Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.

Stories

Children of the New World

Ryan Mateyk

POPSUGAR 2020: A book about social media (kind of)

Literally Black Mirror in book format. I could see any of these stories as an episode and, if Charlie Brooker knows what's good, he should get an adaptation in motion. Each story was a unique idea, centred around similar themes of technology and to a lesser extent climate change. There is romance, heartbreak, action, terror, kids being launched in rockets into space. What makes a lot of these stories so disturbing is how realistic they seem based on where we're at in society today. My only complaint was that by the end of the collection, the monotony of a middle aged white dude protagonist was growing a bit stale. 

Favourite stories:
Children of the New World - living your entire life online turns tragic when your computer-generated, years old children, contract a deadly computer virus
The Cartographers - memories can be manufactured leading to some serious consequences
The Pyramid and the Ass - reminiscent of a dystopian political thriller
Rocket Night - an unpopular/weird child is launched into space once a year to make other parents feel proud of their children
Openness - what would happen if your partner knew absolutely everything about you?
Ice Age - you know what day it is... it's the Day after Tomorrow! literally about a group of survivors living in an igloo community following an Ice Age

Mariane Ferrantino 

Quick, readable short stories imagining a not-too-distant future. If Black Mirror were a book, it would be this.

Amanda Wells

This was another 'random' pick for me - it was available on my library's app, so I borrowed it on a whim without looking at any information about it.

And I'm glad I did, because it was a very different read for me, and I loved it. The stories were all very interesting in concept, and well executed. It got me thinking about the life we lead, the world we are creating, and the potential and danger of the technology we are working towards having in our lives.

I feel like these stories have triggered in me a desire to think more deeply about these topics, and I'll probably be thinking back to the ideas presented here for a long while to come.

Leafling

I haven't been this excited about reading a book in what feels like forever. I knew that I'd like this collection of short stories. It was pitched to me as akin to the TV show Black Mirror, which I absolutely loved. And they weren't wrong about that. Here we have a collection of stories that are all speculative. Set in the very near future, things are just a little different from how they are now. People are a little more hooked into technology, the environment is in worse shape, etc. Our scenarios are set up quickly and with apparent ease, and we then get to see normal people interacting with each other in these worlds. The result is at times funny, at times devastating, often both. Weinstein provides riveting stories about being human as well as biting commentary on our world. In the stories, we've got robotic siblings to help out with biological children, and what you do when they malfunction. Enlightenment as a drug. Manufactured memories. Support groups for the loss of virtual children. It's all so good, and none of it feels wildly off base from where we are as a society right now.

I really emphatically enjoyed this whole collection. The only thing keeping me from loving it unconditionally is the fact that none of the stories have a female main character and none of them pass the Bechdel test. To be fair, two of the stories have weird formats and don't actually have a character. One of the shorter stories never specifies the gender. But it was still disappointing. I get if you're somebody who writes about a certain thing. I do. But to both 1) not take up the challenge to write about somebody different from you, or 2) not see females as "just another kind of person" that should be relatively easy to write about because, again, they are just another kind of person, is a disappointment. If the plots of the stories weren't so intriguing, I probably would've begun to find the "wearied male trying to make his family/life work" character that reappeared in most of the stories boring.

Truly, though, that is my only qualm with the book. I want everyone to read these stories, but my point above is something to be aware of and think about. This is one of the most consistently solid collections of short stories that I've read in a while. I've actually sat and read them aloud to people, they're so good. Dark, cleverly written, and brilliantly imagined. I laughed and I cried. Alexander Weinstein gets it. And, if you were wondering, my favorite story was "The Cartographers."

Full review: Outlandish Lit

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Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

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