A short story collection set in a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly intuitive robots.
The timely, nuanced stories in 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. To this he adds a keenly observant sense of the everyday ... superlatively moving and thought-provoking, imbued with disarming pathos and a palpable sense of wonder and loss.
It’s almost impossible not to think of Black Mirror while reading Children of the New World, a remarkable new short-story collection ... 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. Thanks to wry prose and humor, the collection is less moody and horror-steeped than similar speculative works.
It becomes clear early in the book that Weinstein is a master of his craft. His stories are each elegantly constructed, many with a startling reveal at the end, both surprising and obvious, which is formally reminiscent of certain Golden Age science fiction stories ... On display is an enviable ability on the part of Weinstein to craft endings ... [the] pessimism is deceptive. There is something in the way the characters in his stories endure despite how bleak their world seems to get that seems hopeful.
