Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
A wonderfully inventive, bighearted collection of stories from the author of Children of the New World
A son and his father find music in a drowned city. A daughter gets to know her dead mother's hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. A man is given a choice to have his trauma surgically removed. A lonely twenty-something gets addicted to comfort porn. In these resonant, speculative stories about the human soul's resilience amid rapidly progressing technological advancement, Alexander Weinstein writes about a series of worlds like our own, but rife with the possibilties that our present timeline hasn't led us to--yet.
In the vein of his critically acclaimed first collection, Children of the New World, and a kindred spirit to the work of George Saunders and Ted Chiang and the television show Black Mirror, Universal Love is a prescient, compassionate book, written with one foot in the real world and one stepping bravely, and hopefully, out into the future.
Synopsis
A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about love, compassion, and human resilience in the technological hyper-age, from Alexander Weinstein, author of Children of the New World.
Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother's hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed. In an age when technology offers the easiest cures for loneliness, these characters must wrestle with what it means to remain human in an increasingly cybernetic future, and how love can endure even the most alluring upgrades.
In the vein of Weinstein's critically-acclaimed first collection, Universal Love is a visionary book, written with one foot in the real world and one stepping bravely into the future.