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Shop nowChildren of the New World
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“Imaginative and articulate, Children of the New World envisions fascinating technologies and the cultures shaped by them. As in the best speculative fiction, Weinstein's stories are driven by a longing for deeper answers: What defines us as human? How will we maintain this humanity as our lives become increasingly interwoven with the digital? I am haunted by many of the characters in these stories and their search for the human connection in worlds where technology appears to supersede it, but I am comforted by Weinstein's implication that such connection will still be essential. This debut is an astonishing addition to the world of speculative fiction.”
— Kelsey O'Rourke • Literati Bookstore
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.
Alexander Weinstein is the author of the critically acclaimed Children of the New World and the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Among his many publications, his fiction was awarded the Lamar York Prize and the Gail Crump Prize, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been collected in the anthology 2013 New Stories from the Midwest. He is a professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University and a lecturer at the University of Michigan.
Reviews
“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