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.
This is not an impeccable book. Going through it is a bit like going through a carwash, with alternating spells of monotony and liveliness; some parts are messier than others. But the best of Mr. Weinstein’s stories whistle with a cockeyed, formidable intelligence, and he is not afraid to provoke ... At his least artful moments, Mr. Weinstein’s stories are too literal, and his moral takeaways, too obvious ... But at their finest, Mr. Weinstein’s stories contain moments of moral complexity and, even more challenging — and more moving — moments of grace.
