Universal Love
Stories
ISBN10: 1250144361
ISBN13: 9781250144362
Trade Paperback
240 Pages
$16.00
CA$22.00
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.
Reviews
Praise for Universal Love
"Funny and terrifying . . . Universal Love picks up where [Children of the New World] left off."—Ann Arbor Observer
"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
"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 Reviews
"Troubling and compassionate . . . Channeling Ray Bradbury with contemporary allegories, Weinstein will make readers think twice about their relationship to technology."—Publishers Weekly
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
THE YEAR OF NOSTALGIA
I.
Nin found Dad frozen in the backyard. He wasn’t trimming the hedges, just standing with his clippers in hand, staring at the bushes, she told me. Who knew how long he’d been like that, his body shivering....