Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein
Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Children of the New World
Stories

Author: Alexander Weinstein

Narrator: David Aaron Baker

Unabridged: 5 hr 59 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/18/2016


Synopsis

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.

About Alexander Weinstein

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

Goodreads review by Always on June 11, 2017

A collection of short stories centered around technological and cultural changes that may happen in the future, mostly centered around changes like virtual reality and the increasing ability to share with one another. I think this was a lot stronger than most collections of short stories but I haven......more

Goodreads review by James on January 24, 2023

As comforting as it is to think of the "human condition" as some kind of universal experience transcending Time and Place....and I think us Book Folk probably cling to this myth more than most....the older I get, the less I believe it to be true. Technology is transforming us as a species, whether w......more

Goodreads review by Peter on March 06, 2018

I was about to shelve this book as science-fiction, but I don't think that's an entirely accurate description. Yes these stories take place some years from now, but they imagine the near rather than the distant future. All of the scenarios they present seem frighteningly plausible and in some cases,......more

Goodreads review by Figgy on February 17, 2017

Fans of the show Black Mirror are bound to find something to like in Weinstein’s collection of stories. Each of these stories has something to do with technology, whether that be humanity’s reliance on it, the ways in which it warps our interactions with each other, or how we deal with a sudden loss......more

Goodreads review by Blair on October 09, 2024

(Review written April 2017.) Every time I started a new story in Children of the New World, I kept thinking: surely at least one of these is going to be something less than absolutely brilliant, surely this is the one that's going to let me down. Spoiler: it doesn't happen. The stories here are soft......more


Quotes

“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


Awards

  • New York Times Book Review Notable Books of the Year
  • NPR Best Book of the Year