Universal Love: Stories

by Alexander Weinstein

Overview

A hypnotic collection of speculative fiction about compassion, love, 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, the characters within these stories must wrestle with what it means to stay 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250144348
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	01/21/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	228
File size:	4 MB

About the Author

Alexander Weinstein is the author of Children of the New World, which was named a notable book of the year by the New York Times, NPR, and Electric Literature. He is a recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his stories have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and appear in Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy and Best American Experimental Writing. He is the Director of The Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and a professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University.

Table of Contents

The Year of Nostalgia
Beijing
Comfort Porn
We Only Wanted Their Happiness
Purple Heart
True Love Testimonials
Childhood
Sanctuary
Infinite Realities
Mountain Song
Islanders
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

12/23/2019

Set in the near future, Weinstein’s troubling and compassionate collection (after Children of the New World) imagines some dire ramifications of social media and robotics. In the sweetly comic “The Year of Nostalgia,” a dead woman returns in the form of a hologram, complete with memories and personality traits assembled from her social media accounts and diaries. Leah, the reanimated woman’s daughter, discovers a more adventurous, free-spirited version of her mother than the Midwestern housewife she remembered, since the hologram has been programmed to act on her desires for travel and romance. The portentous “Beijing,” set in a future version of the city so polluted that it’s only possible to navigate by stopping at stations that dispense breathable air, follows a gay American expatriate whose lover has become addicted to having his memories removed through microsurgeries, leaving the men’s relationship suspended in the present. In the chilling “Childhood,” the robot “son” of a suburban couple observes his older robot sister becoming addicted to illicitly smoking her “emotion card” through a glass pipe. Though some of the stories lean on intriguing concepts without developing complete narratives, the collection convincingly explores many potential effects of social engineering. Channeling Ray Bradbury with contemporary allegories, Weinstein will make readers think twice about their relationship to technology. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Universal Love:

Funny and terrifying. . . .Universal Love picks up where [Children of the New World] left off.
--Ann Arbor Observer

Weinstein made a big splash in SF with his debut collection and follows it up with nearly a dozen stories that are just as creepy and will fit right in if you're watching Black Mirror. . . .In dark times, we get entertainment that reflects the world we've made. Welcome home.
--Kirkus

Troubling and compassionate . . . .Channeling Ray Bradbury with contemporary allegories, Weinstein will make readers think twice about their relationship to technology.
--Publishers Weekly

These are deeply imaginative and compelling stories, written with exquisite poise, that bring the speculative and uncanny very close to home. Weinstein is here to remind us that questions of technology, of the future of our world, are also, always, questions of human intimacy and human care.
--Jennifer Mills, author of Dyschronia

Praise for Alexander Weinstein:

"The timely, nuanced stories in Alexander Weinstein's Children of the New World are some of the most brilliantly disconcerting fiction in recent memory...As with George Saunders or Ray Bradbury, Weinstein's satiric ingenuity seldom overpowers his deep compassion for our wayward species....The resulting cautionary tales are superlatively moving and thought-provoking, imbued with disarming pathos and a palpable sense of wonder and loss."
--David Wright, The Seattle Times

Seductive...Weinstein's stories whistle with a cockeyed, formidable intelligence, and he is not afraid to provoke.... At their finest, Mr. Weinstein's stories contain moments of moral complexity and, even more challenging--and more moving--moments of grace."
--The New York Times

A darkly comic look at how far people will go to hold on to the devices that are replacing human experience.
--The Washington Post

From the Publisher

2019-12-23
Eleven new stories about our potentially weird future.

Weinstein (Children of the New World, 2016) made a big splash in SF with his debut collection and follows it up with nearly a dozen stories that are just as creepy and will fit right in if you're watching Black Mirror. The opener, "The Year of Nostalgia," comes especially close to that particular flavor; it concerns a family trying to deal with grief by interacting with their hologram relatives. In "Beijing," we find people living in the last days of the climate crisis erasing unpleasant memories of the things that hurt them most. "Comfort Porn" takes the concept of Tinder and similar apps to an unpleasant destination. Really, it's all a prescient warning about technology, not that we really need a warning at this point. In "We Only Wanted Their Happiness," indulgent parents give their kids access to information that turns them into little monsters. "True Love Testimonials" is, yes, a little weird, with its post-Tinder confessions about how to hook up with, say, a guy you can make look like your ex, or hosting "morphing orgies." Things get stranger. In "Childhood," the kids...malfunction, and we'll leave it at that. Inevitably, in "Sanctuary," we discover aliens, but in the most unusual and dangerous place imaginable. Time travel? Sure, why not? In "Infinite Realities," we meet someone trying to find the version where they get it right, for once. We're running out of time, so to speak, but there's something to say about abandonment in "Mountain Song" and, finally, another dry look at the end times in "Islanders."

In dark times, we get entertainment that reflects the world we've made. Welcome home.

Kirkus Reviews