Publishers Weekly
★ 08/01/2016
Touching on virtual families, climate change, implanted memories, and more, Weinstein’s debut collection of digital-age sci-fi stories is scary, recognizable, heartbreaking, witty, and absolutely human. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” Jim has to shut down a malfunctioning Yang—a humanoid who has been a “Big Brother” to Jim’s adopted daughter for three years. In “The Cartographers,” Adam designs and sells manufactured memories, until he gets so hooked on testing his software that he can no longer tell which memories are his own. “Heartland” shows a Midwest where topsoil is a precious commodity, and when a father loses his job “installing gardens,” he resorts to exploiting the cuteness of his children to make ends meet. In the virtual-driven world of the title story, a couple lose their digital children to a reboot when they download a virus in the “Dark City.” The disturbing and darkly funny “Rocket Night” features parents who gather annually to decide which least-liked child in the elementary school will be launched on a rocket to space. Complete with footnotes from fictional future publications and technology that is just one leap away, this is mind-bending stuff. Weinstein’s collection is full of spot-on prose, wicked humor, and heart. Agent: Leigh Feldman, Leigh Feldman Literary Agency. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
“A darkly mesmerizing, fearless, and exquisitely written work. Stunning, harrowing, and brilliantly imagined.” —Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven
“[Weinstein's] stories look like SF—consider the childless couple living in a virtual-reality community whose child there is wiped out by a computer virus—but read like literary fiction. Calling all fans of Margaret Atwood and Emily St. John Mandel.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal Prepub Alert
“In Alexander Weinstein's debut collection, the future is a frightening and familiar place. Weinstein takes our uneasy truce with technology and blows it up, giving us child robots and ice worlds and the dark aftermath of failed revolutions. The collection is nothing short of a gorgeous new cold war, pitting us both with and against the science that threatens to become not-so-fictional every day.” —Amber Sparks, author of The Unfinished World: And Other Stories
Kirkus Reviews
2016-06-22
Thirteen stories illuminating the dangers of a tech-obsessed future.In the opening pages of Weinstein's debut collection, a man's son begins acting strangely at the breakfast table, eventually slamming his head into his bowl of cereal. In short order, readers learn that this boy is actually a lifelike android, purchased by the family to act as a kind of cultural liaison and big brother to the couple's youngest child, an adopted girl from China. This story, "Saying Goodbye to Yang," contains many of the elements that populate the collection: a white male narrator; a setting about 10 or 12 years in the future when the borders between technology and humanity have become increasingly blurred; and a pointed moral. In the title story, a childless couple is able to conceive virtual children in the "New World" (a totally immersive virtual environment), but then must face all-too-real grief when a virus infects their account and they must delete all their data, including their kids. In "The Pyramid and the Ass," one of two stories that take up the theme of Eastern spirituality as practiced by Westerners, Buddhist "terrorists" kidnap people who've had technology chemically and physically implanted in their bodies. Each of the stories feels utterly possible, and the worlds are deftly rendered—whether they show us the effects of climate change or new types of sex made possible by advanced technology. The strongest pieces are those that, like "Saying Goodbye to Yang," explore the nuances of these imagined futures rather than simply romanticizing a world before social media ruined our abilities to interact with each other face to face and depleted our desire to connect with nature. A cleverly wrought, if moralistic, group of tales.
