Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein Review

A robot companion “dies” leaving his family to deal with the surprisingly painful loss. A company creates fake memories to be implanted in its customers. Spiritual enlightenment is bought and sold Matrix-style, by plugging into them. A dark society sends children into space to die for seemingly no reason. People struggle to survive in a new Ice Age. And reincarnation is made real so that nobody dies - even those who want to…

Alexander Weinstein presents a series of quite weak dystopian future stories in his collection Children of the New World. They’re mostly well-written but the stories themselves aren’t particularly compelling or memorable and overall feel like watered-down versions of things that were more fresh and interesting to read about when they appeared in the work of Philip K Dick, among other more famous sci-fi writers.

Heartland is about the only story here that was any good (even though Saying Goodbye to Yang is the one to have been adapted into film, Kogonada’s After Yang - not great either). It’s about a desperate father who is forced to contemplate doing something terrible to make money that’ll hurt his family as well as save it. When Weinstein’s not playing on a derivative gimmick and focusing on a character’s internal dilemma is when he’s writing something worthwhile - unfortunately this rarely happens in this collection.

Instead, there’s lots of stories about virtual reality, machine implants, climate change, and other tired tropes we’ve seen before in a hundred other sci-fi stories (humanity’s basic nature can’t be changed superficially/the futuristic fake stuff makes lives bad - dystopian!). There’s nothing new here and Weinstein doesn’t do anything different with them either. And those are just the stories that are about something - a couple here, Excerpts from the New World Authorized Dictionary and A Brief History of the Failed Revolution, are too obtuse and come off as failed experiments.

Weinstein can write well and his style is accessible but his stories just aren’t very good. Bland, unimpressive sci-fi that could’ve been written by anyone, Children of the New World isn’t worth checking out even for fans of the genre.