![]() Weinstein dedicates the book to his son, and almost all of the stories are shot through with parental anxiety and instinctual fear. It urges the question: As attached as we are to our devices now, what will happen when they become increasingly, realistically human? What if we truly come to care for them, to treat them as family? The story suggests that empathy, at least, might have the capacity to expand in the new digital age. This means the loss of a babysitter, but also something more complex-the pathos evoked as the family confronts the possibility that Yang may cease to exist is acute. He’s also liable to malfunction while not under warranty. Yang’s programmed to help inform his little sister about her cultural heritage, which means he’s prone to offering up facts about ancient Chinese instruments, or the number of li that make up the Great Wall. Yang, it transpires, is a robot “Big Brother” purchased by the narrator and his wife to take care of their infant daughter, Mika, adopted from China. ![]() One of the more heartening insights comes in the first story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang.” A father is flummoxed at breakfast when his teenager, Yang, begins jamming his face repeatedly into his cereal bowl for no particular reason. And, sometimes, to moments of enhanced humanity. The emotional susceptibilities and moral quandaries that have ruined and redeemed us throughout history survive unscathed, condemning us to all kinds of high-tech misery. Bush has been president for 10 consecutive life cycles.) But the common thread is that humans seem to be remarkably unchanged. (“The Pyramid and the Ass” imagines a world in which Buddhist reincarnation has been co-opted by a corporation named Soul Co. The 13 stories are set in broadly different visions of the future, some of them ravaged by climate change, others considerably more fanciful. Weinstein subtly infuses his cautionary tales about the price of submitting so credulously to technological progress with a sense of inevitability. But Children of the New World is no less ominous. Thanks to wry prose and humor, the collection is less moody and horror-steeped than similar speculative works. By turns satirical, jarring, ludicrous, and sad, Weinstein’s stories take present-day anxieties about pornography, cloning, social media, and digital isolation, and follow them to their logical extremes. Both imagine worlds recognizably like our own, but with an element or two distorted: The horrors that will doom us in the future, they presume, are the same things that plague us now, most of them prompted by simple folly. It’s almost impossible not to think of Black Mirror while reading Children of the New World, a remarkable new short-story collection by Alexander Weinstein. And if there’s one thing we know about mankind, it’s this: We’re usually clumsy.” Dystopia will be the product not of malice, but innate idiocy. Each episode, he wrote, is “about the way we live now-and the way we might be living in 10 minutes time if we’re clumsy. In 2011, shortly before his acclaimed speculative miniseries Black Mirror debuted on British television, Charlie Brooker wrote an article for The Guardian explaining what inspired the show. Illustrations by: Herta Arnaud, Rebecca Chang Jen Lin, Natalia Chirkowska, Courtney L Ellis, Dilianny Espinoza, Tor Ewen, Jon Higham, Neko Jiang, Lou Kiss, Yian Lee, Ellie Lonsdale, Esmé Alice Mackey, Vivi Maidanik, Nika Mamedova, Akesi Martinez, Shauna Mckeon, Jemima Muir, Andrei Nicolescu, Alejandra Peñaloza, Ellis Pearce, Ione Rail, Rowena Sheehan, Maria Skliarova, Jasmine Tutton, Rachel Joan Wallis, Zhigang Zhang.Of all the things to fear about the future-climate change, sentient robots, the end of avocados-the most culturally salient one isn’t fear itself, but us, ourselves. ![]() Words by: Carol Casey, Elizabeth Gibson, David Heidenstam, Haleigh Morgan, Sarah Coakley, Twanda Rolle, John Davis, Sequoia Nagamatsu, Kym Deyn, Claire Orchard, Jill McKenzie, Alison Gormon, Linda Goulden, Linda McCauley Freeman, Liam McClelland, Ami Hendrickson, Christopher Thomas, Thea Zimmer, Finolla Scott, Sophie Goldsworthy, Lucy Beckley, Jennifer Stark, Melanie Jones, Victoria Jeynes, Harriet Truscott, Ben Tallon, Steven Mitchell, Susie McComb. It goes deep, with tales of selkies, hot tub time machines, submerged villages, and severe droughts. The Water Issue is a collection of vivid writing, exploring our relationship with the wet stuff.
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