Contemporary Authors

• Children of the New World ( short stories) Picador (New York, NY), 2016

Library of Congress Online Catalog 1. Children of the new world : stories LCCN 2016019224 Type of material Book Personal name Weinstein, Alexander author. Uniform title Short stories. Selections Main title Children of the new world : stories / Alexander Weinstein. Edition First edition. Published/Produced New York : Picador, 2016. Projected pub date 1111 Description pages cm ISBN 9781250098993 (trade pbk.) CALL NUMBER PS3623.E4324467 A6 2016 Request in Jefferson or Adams Building Reading Rooms LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ONLINE CATALOG Library of Congress 101 Independence Ave., SE Washington, DC 20540 Questions? Ask a Librarian: https://www.loc.gov/rr/askalib/ask-contactus.html

• author's website - https://www.alexanderweinsteinfiction.com/

  Alexander Weinstein is the Director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (Picador 2016). His fiction and translations have appeared in Cream City Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Notre-Dame Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, World Literature Today, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prize. His stories have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and appear in the anthologies 2013 New Stories from the Midwest, and the 2014 & 2015 Lascaux Prize Stories. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and a freelance editor, and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe.

  Children of the New World introduces readers to a near-future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and frighteningly intuitive robots. Many of these characters live in a utopian future of instant connection and technological gratification that belies an unbridgeable human distance, while others inhabit a post-collapse landscape made primitive by disaster.

  ​

  Children of the New World grapples with our unease in this modern world and how our ever-growing dependence on new technologies has changed the shape of our society. Alexander Weinstein is a visionary new voice in speculative fiction for all of us who are fascinated by and terrified of what we might find on the horizon.

  ​PUBLICATIONS

  FICTION

  Fall Line, Pleiades, Winter 2016

  Moksha, New Ohio Review, Fall 2016

  Mountain Song, Pleiades, Summer 2016

  Openness, Beloit Fiction Journal (Hamlin Garland Prize Winner), Spring 2016

  Understanding Great Artists, Hayden's Ferry Review, Spring 2016

  The Ice Pack Magician, Permafrost, Spring 2016

  Destinations of Loss, The Adroit, Spring 2016

  Vanishing Destinations, Southern Indiana Review, Spring 2016

  Destinations of Longing, Chattahoochee Review, Spring 2016

  The Prophet, New Millennium Writings, Winner 2016 (Winner Short Fiction Contest)

  Destinations of Entrapment, Notre Dame Review, Winter 2016

  The Museum of False Doors, River Styx, Summer 2015 (Honorable Mention Shafly Prize)

  The Cartographers, Chattahoochee Review, Summer 2014 (Lamar York Fiction Prize)
  Children of the New World, Pleiades, Fall 2013 (Gail Crump Fiction Prize)
  Excerpts from the World Authorized Dictionary, Cream City Review, Fall 2013
  Stories from the Old World, Georgetown Review, Summer 2013
  Rocket Night, Southern Indiana Review, Spring 2013
  The Great Flood, Permafrost, Spring 2013
  Migration, PRISM International, Fall 2012
  Ice Age, Natural Bridge, Fall 2012
  The Final Days of Father Troll, Western Humanities Review, Summer 2012
  The City of Labarinto, Zone 3, Winter 2012
  Infidelities, Quarter Past Eight, Winter 2012
  Alligator Scars, The MacGuffin, Fall 2011
  Impossible Shapes, Sou’Wester, Spring 2011
  Heartland, Pleiades, Spring 2011
  The Apocalypse Tales: Amanda Makes a Friend, Notre Dame Review, Summer 2010
  Saying Goodbye to Yang, Zahir, Winter 2010
  A Brief History of the Failed Revolution, Infinity’s Kitchen, Summer 2010
  Fern, Rio Grande Review, Winter 2009
  Incomplete Sentence, Hawai’i-Pacific Review, Fall 2009
  The Pyramid and the Ass, A Cappella Zoo, Fall 2009

  TRANSLATIONS

  Heather, Saturday Morning My Father Makes Bread, The Hens, Fugue, Summer 2016

  The Illusionist, Conduit, Summer 2016

  Everything is One Movement & To Walk Over the Hill, Southern Indiana Review, Summer 2015

  One of Us is Sleeping & Days in the Summerhouse, Massachusetts Review, Spring 2015

  Five Selected Translations, Fjords, Fall 2012 (Featured Translator)
  We See our Mother Go to Bed, World Literature Today, Summer 2012
  No Colors Are Foreign, Salamander, Spring 2012
  Grandmother & Fall, Conduit, Fall 2011

• macmillan - http://us.macmillan.com/author/alexanderweinstein/

  ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Among his many publications, his fiction was awarded the Lamar York Prize and the Gail Crump Prize, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and has been collected in the anthology 2013 New Stories from the Midwest. He is a professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University and a lecturer at the University of Michigan.

• U MI - https://lsa.umich.edu/rc/people/faculty/arweinst.html

  Alexander Weinstein

  Lecturer, Creative Writing and Literature Program

  Office Information:

  1300 E Ann Street
  phone: 734.764.7521

  Creative Writing and Literature

• Siena Heights U - http://english.sienaheights.edu/alexander-weinstein.html

  Picture
  Contact Information
  Office: 312B Sacred Heart Hall
  Office Phone: 517-264-7697
  E-mail: aweinste@sienaheights.edu
  Professor Weinstein's Website

  Academic Background
  Indiana University, M.F.A. in Creative Writing-Fiction
  Indiana University, M.A. in English
  Naropa University, B.A. in Creative Writing

  Courses Taught
  English 150: Introduction to Creative Writing
  English 271/342: Fiction Workshop
  English 272/363 and 273/264: Eclipse Editing and Publishing
  Liberal Arts Studies 141: Diversity and Community
  Liberal Arts Studies 241: Inquiry and Truth
  Liberal Arts Studies 341: Contemplation and Action
  Special Creative Writing Topics Classes, Graphic Novels and Comics

  About Professor Weinstein
  Professor Weinstein teaches a wide range of creative writing workshops and liberal arts core seminars. In addition to fiction writing and editing, his interests include jazz and world music, magical realism, world spirituality, and dance & theater. He is also the director of the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing.

  A prolific writer, Professor Weinstein has published fiction, non-fiction, and translations of Danish literature. You can learn more about his work at his website. His recent publications include:

  Story Collection
  Children of the New World (Picador, 2016)

  Fiction
  “The Cartographers,” Chattahoochee Review
  “Shared Love,” Midwestern Gothic
  “Children of the New World,” Pleiades
  “Excerpts from the World Authorized Dictionary,” Cream City Review
  “Rocket Night,” Southern Indiana Review
  “The Great Flood,” Permafrost
  “Migration,” PRISM International
  “Ice Age,” Natural Bridge
  “The Final Days of Father Troll,” Western Humanities Review
  “Impossible Shapes,” Sou’Wester
  “Heartland,” Pleiades
  “The Apocalypse Tales,” Notre Dame Review

  Translations
  “Five Selected Translations,” Fjords (Featured Translator)
  “We See our Mother Go to Bed,” World Literature Today
  “No Colors Are Foreign,” Salamander
  “Grandmother” and “Fall,” Conduit

  Non-Fiction
  “Towards a Moral Fiction,” Pleiades, Winter 2014
  “Reincarnations of Space-Men,” Lalitamba

  Recent Honors and Awards
  2015 Stimson-Tsuji Award for Scholarship, Siena Heights University
  2015 Sustainable Arts Foundation Recipient in Fiction
  2015 Hamlin-Garland Prize in Fiction for "Openness" (Beloit Fiction Journal)
  2015 New Millennium Prize in Fiction for "The Prophet" (New Millennium Writings)
  2013 New Stories from the Midwest Anthology for “Heartland,”
  The Gail Crump Fiction Prize (Pleiades) for “Children of the New World”
  The Lamar York Fiction Prize (Chattahoochee Review) for “The Cartographers”

• facebook - https://www.facebook.com/people/Alexander-Weinstein/641936256

  About Alexander Weinstein
  Work

  Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing
  Director (company) · 2010 to present
  The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing is a summer Writer's Retreat founded to give writers the opportunity to develop their craft.

  Education

  Current City and Hometown

  Ann Arbor, Michigan
  Current city
  Brooklyn, New York
  Hometown

  Favorites
  Music

  [Courtney Dowe Singer/Songwriter]
  Courtney Dowe Singer/Songwriter

  Books

  [Winesburg, Indiana]
  Winesburg, Indiana

  Movies

  [The Mask You Live In]
  The Mask You Live In

  Other

  The Pit Stop Workshop Co., Bella Italia Pizza N Pasta, Jefferson R. Davis, The Ann Arbor Aviary, Awakened Breath, mad king, Sarah Nguyen, Levi Shand, Josefine Klougart, CHEAP POP, The Yellow Barn, Tree of Life Cultural Arts Studio, The Hosting, Seaside Writers Conference, 35 Over 35and more

• read it forward - http://www.readitforward.com/authors/alexander-weinstein-dealing-writers-block/

  Alexander Weinstein on Dealing with Writer’s Block
  How to silence The Inner Critic and rediscover The Writer within.
  By ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN • 7 months ago
  Writer's Block

  Writer’s Block—we’ve all heard of it, and it’s a great worry for many writers. I think the fear of Writer’s Block, and of course the struggle with an inability to write, resides in deeply held insecurities about our own creativity. I often teach that two roommates live in the writer’s mind. The Writer—who loves writing, and The Inner Critic—who badmouths anything and everything the writer accomplishes. Our job, as writers, is to separate the two because they’re really bad housemates.

  To do this means rediscovering The Writer within us. Likely, all of us who write remember when we first started writing—the magic of it, how we simply played with words on the page. It’s this state of exuberant creation which The Writer loves. The Writer can write all day, thinks everything she/he writes is brilliant, and wants to write more. This is the feeling we want to tap into when we sit down to create new work.

  But, for most writers, the Inner Critic has already stepped into the writing process with very annoying questions like: Why are you even writing? Don’t you see what garbage this is? Do you really think you have the talent to write? And it’s precisely here where The Writer part of ourselves gets stifled, and we can experience what we call writer’s block.

  So my advice has always been to kick the Inner Critic out of the room when you sit down to write. Give the Inner Critic the credit card and let them go out on the town—and in this way, we can let The Writer have fun for the day. Because The Writer needs to be able to make a mess, make mistakes, write unpublishable nonsense, and have fun while exploring the page.
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  This kind of semi-schizophrenia has proven the most helpful to me in avoiding writer’s block—because it frees me up to write messy first drafts, take risks, experiment, and be able to write junk. As writers, we cannot fear writing bad work. In fact, if we are to have any success, we need to produce tons of crappy work—because that means we’re writing. And alongside drafts that will never see the light of day, we’ll have plenty of gems which, with time and polish, will become illuminated in the way we’d initially hoped.

  There came a point, about four years ago, when I became blocked as a writer. I’d started having a number of story publications—and I mention this only to note that success in writing doesn’t quiet the Inner Critic. I had to find a way to keep my writing alive and rediscover the joy within my work. So I began writing fictional postcards. The postcard is a wonderful short form, where you can write flash fiction and prose poems quickly. Not only that, but postcards allow you to write in all genres. You can write a fantastical postcard: “Dear Mary, I’ve just arrived among the fairies. Tonight they light the bonfires and sail in acorns down the river.” Or realist postcards, “Dear Mary, The winter has arrived and I’m still in upstate New York. I remember our days together in the old farmhouse. The way you loved me.” Ad infinitum. So I’d write these postcards (to and from fictional people) and send them to my friends without telling them I was doing so. I had a practice of writing 4-5 postcards a day, and I ended up producing hundreds of them over the next year. There was a great sense of play within this practice, and I made sure never to keep any copies of the postcards I wrote. This way, if I thought I’d written junk—off it went; and if I thought I’d written brilliance—off it went. This lack of attachment freed up both The Writer and The Inner Critic in me, and also revealed how prolific one can be when we allow ourselves to play.

  So, in terms of antidotes for Writer’s Block, I suggest tapping back into the part of The Writer which wants to explore again. Create a practice where you produce work which you’ll either destroy or give away. You can write fictional love/break-up notes and leave them on park benches or within the pages of borrowed library books, write fictional postcards and send them to people in the phone book, write twenty prose poems, fold them into paper airplanes, and send them off the balconies of apartment buildings. The key is to create a practice wherein you’re able to tap into that wellspring of imagination without attachment or judgment. I believe it’s from this place that we can rediscover our creativity and lessen our fears about that dreaded writer’s block.

• midwestern gothic - http://midwestgothic.com/2016/11/interview-alexander-weinstein/

  Interview: Alexander Weinstein

  alexander weinsteinMidwestern Gothic staffer Kristina Perkins talked with author Alexander Weinstein about his collection Children of the New World, the relationship between technological and interpersonal connection, finding hope in dystopia and more.

  **

  Kristina Perkins: What’s your connection to the Midwest?

  Alexander Weinstein: I’m originally from New York, and came to the Midwest by way of Portland, Oregon (where I was a chef for many years) and Boulder, Colorado (where I finished my undergraduate degree at Naropa University). I first came to the Midwest when I entered Indiana University’s MFA program in Bloomington, and then six years ago I moved to Ann Arbor for my teaching position.

  KP: How has the Midwest — as a place, a community, and/or a value system — influenced your writing?

  AW: It’s been an interesting mix of compassion, joy, and despair! The final story in the collection, “Ice Age”, came about from the first winter I spent in Michigan. We were covered in perpetual snow and ice, and I felt like I was living through an ice age! There’s also a great deal of urban decay and economically devastated communities throughout Michigan, which has led to the socio-economic and environmental settings which appear in the collection. There have been travesties of justice throughout Michigan. Our governor, Rick Snyder, knowingly switched the city’s water source and so poisoned the families of Flint. So this kind of political crime is far beyond any dystopia I could dream up in my fiction. Detroit, which is nearby, contains post-apocalyptic landscapes while also birthing urban-farming and re-inhabited art and community spaces—and this speaks to a kind of dystopic hopefulness that underlies the collection.

  So that’s the element of despair that I’ve felt in the Midwest. As for compassion and joy, I’ve been raising my son here in the Midwest, and our relationship brings a great amount of joy to my life. This element of parenthood plays a big part in the collection. I also think there’s a real genuineness and kindness underlying Midwestern sensibilities. In many ways, there’s a lack of pretentiousness in the Midwest (in particular, the uber-hipsterism which one can find in many coastal cities) and I admire this Midwestern honesty. I remember one winter, when my car went off the road during a snowstorm, there were literally dozens of people who stopped to help me and my family. Perhaps this level of human kindness is present throughout the US, but I’ve noticed it in particular since moving to the Midwest.

  KP: Your debut collection, Children of the New World, focuses on the (often times inverse) relationship between technological and interpersonal connection. How would you describe your own relationship to technology — not as only a writer, but as a teacher, father, and community member?

  AW: There are a great number of social/political ways that the internet helps us — we learn about social injustices around the world thanks to the internet, and we’re able to protest and create human rights movements due to the networking capabilities technology provides. All of which I use the internet for. One can also download great spiritual talks from thinkers like Ram Das, Rabbi Zalman, Terrance McKenna, or the Dalai Lama. In this way, there’s a wonderful availability of spiritual teachings thanks to technology — and I often listen to these podcasts and find them very enriching.

  Of course, the internet isn’t good or bad, it all depends on how we use it. But my fear is that we’re not really using it that well. The endless emailing and texting, the spambot click-bait, and the millions of mini-games out there — it all creates an intense addiction to our devices. I find myself checking my phone 30-40 times a day, at red lights I send off a last text to someone—these are behaviors symptomatic of addiction. So, while I certainly use/need technology on a daily basis, I’ve been making an effort to disconnect. I leave the phone at home now, am considering reinstalling a landline, and try to avoid screen time as much as possible. I’ve even started calling people instead of texting them (what a bizarre idea-right!) And I’ve been working with my son to help him not overuse technology, since I think these issues of addiction are all the more severe for the generations raised with devices.

  children of the new world

  KP: You’ve said in previous interviews that, despite their themes of dystopia, anxiety, and fear, your stories are ultimately hopeful. When crafting your stories, how much are your plots influenced by this sense of optimism?

  AW: I put a good deal of importance on hopefulness and human kindness within my writing. I really do want my stories to inspire positive change in the world — whether it’s due to a sense of optimism, empathy, a desire for human love and connection, or for activism. For this reason, it’s particularly hard when I have a darker story come to me.

  For example, the story “Heartland” is one of the most devastating stories in the collection. The parents in that story are struggling so deeply, and the decisions they are forced to confront are awful ones that I’d never want anyone to have to make. While writing that story, I really struggled against my own sense of optimism. The story doesn’t match up with my hope for the world, and originally I tried to make the story a humorous one to lighten the mood (if you know the story: a clearly asinine endeavor). This attempt — to superimpose my own philosophical desires on the story — made the story unwriteable for two years. I finally had to get myself out of the way and allow the story to be told in the tone it demanded.

  KP: Why do you think science fiction writing places so much emphasis on the dystopian, the post-apocalyptic? Should we make more room for utopian literature? Put another way: what is the relationship between dystopia and utopia, both in Children of the New World specifically and sci-fi generally?

  AW: Well, we’re certainly living though rough times. Fracking is making our water flammable, police are killing innocent black people with seeming impunity, there’s a legal system increasingly set up to protect corporations, and in North Dakota, the tribes of all nations have been amassing to protest the seizing of their lands by oil companies and are facing brutality from the National Guard. These are huge social, environmental, and human rights issues (just to name a few). When I look at these issues, I see a world much more dystopic than anything I could come up with. So I think sci-fi writers are often looking critically at the world, and dystopian stories offer social critique and literary activism. Certainly the stories in Children of the New World are working in this vein.

  And yet, I’m totally fascinated by this idea of a new utopian literature. In many ways, I feel like our art forms (particularly in the past 40 years) have been largely informed by a kind of ironic/cynical stance. Intellectual acuity has gone hand in hand with a kind of jaded, ironic cynicism. There are many writers who I admire that revel in this cynicism — David Foster Wallace is a prime example. There are of course exceptions to this rule (Italo Calvino and Tom Robbins) but largely we’ve been in the business of cynicism for the past couple decades. This makes me think that there may be an unexplored genre out there: one which utilizes the emotion of unabashed joy as its central motivation. I’ve been thinking a lot about the jubilant story. What does a story look like that takes the tone of a praise poem? A story which sings? This sort of story would somehow have to celebrate the mystery of being alive, of human kindness, of love, compassion, and care. I think the poets are already exploring this terrain much more readily than fiction writers. I really love Ross Gay’s collection, Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude — which has an incredible amount of love and praise for humanity. The question a more utopian literature raises is how one deals with conflict? Perhaps, the very notion that fiction needs conflict is merely a remnant of the older models of narrative (which are intrinsically linked to cynicism). Are there other craft techniques that would supplant the element of conflict in a more utopian literature? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but the idea of the joyous story is always simmering in the back of my mind.

  KP: The landscapes of Children of the New World are decidedly futuristic: your characters live in societies where clones, robots, and even virtual sex games are commonplace. Despite this technological futurism, you’ve mentioned that you consider your work more as speculative fiction than traditional sci-fi. Why do you make this distinction? What, to you, are the benefits of this sort of genre hybridity?

  AW: Since I don’t get into the actual science behind the technology, my stories don’t fall into the technical category of sci-fi. Scientific believability is often a badge of honor for sci-fi writers — deservedly so — and because of this, I feel that my work is speculative rather than scientific. My focus on the very human dramas of life (the struggle to love well, to be good parents, to navigate relationships) also shares a great deal with the genre of literary realism. So the genre labels of speculative fiction and slipstream work well for covering both of these terrains. All that said, I’m not a huge fan of siphoning literature into genres — I’m much more for letting all genres (sci-fi, detective, mystery, adventure, humor, absurdity, realism) come under the heading of simply “Fiction.”

  KP: I was wondering if you could talk a little more about your creative writing program at Martha’s Vineyard. Why did you start it? What drew you to an island off the coast of Massachusetts?

  AW: When I first became a writer, I imagined I’d be entering into an actively artistic community, full of late night dinners, philosophical conversations, impromptu poetry readings, etc. And there have been times of such artistic collaboration in my life and also throughout history (the Expatriates in Paris, The Beat Generation, etc.) But I was surprised to find that the writing life was much more solitary than I’d expected, often fraught with faceless rejections, and unfortunately besieged by internal hierarchies and competition. This idea of a hierarchy (and it appears in writing programs where only “the best” student writers get to work with “the most prominent” faculty) was completely antithetical to what I considered an artistic community.

  So in 2010 I founded The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing in order to create a summer writing program where writers of all ages and experience levels could work together in a supportive and craft-intensive environment. The founding goals were to minimize competition and nurture cooperation, craft, and community. MVICW is also specifically focused on breaking down the hierarchies and literary egos which can arise in more competitive programs, and promoting a model of inclusivity. Attendees work closely with the visiting faculty, there are evening readings, craft seminars, and faculty and attendees celebrate with a dinner together — so it creates a much more intimate and creative environment (the kind I’d hoped for when I first became a writer).

  Every year I’ve been inviting award-winning authors, poets, and literary journal editors to come to MVICW as faculty. Since we are a non-profit organization, our mission is to help writers in financial need, and I’m engaged in fundraising and grant writing to create fellowships for writers who would benefit from the program but couldn’t otherwise afford to come. Over the past seven years we’ve been able to offer dozens of scholarships to writers, and my hope is to eventually have a fully endowed program.

  As for Martha’s Vineyard, my family has our home on the island, and so it’s been my home for a long time. The island has a really rich history of supporting literature and the arts, and it’s also one of the most beautiful places I know. So I wanted to share this place, which means so much to me, with other writers.

  KP: Who is your favorite contemporary author, and what type of inspiration do you draw from their work?

  AW: Can I name more than one? If so: Tom Robbins, Ishmael Reed, Tatyana Tolstaya, George Saunders, Karen Russell, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, Michael Martone, Steven Millhauser, Victor Pelevin…I could go on. I love how each of these writers experiments with the borders of fiction and the so-called “rules” of literature.

  KP: What’s one thing you wish you had known when you first began writing?

  AW: The number of rejections inherent in finding success! We’re talking hundreds upon hundreds of rejections — which is par for the course.

  KP: What’s next for you?

  AW: I’m presently working on my second book with Picador, The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide, a novel comprised of tour guide entries that describe fantastical cities, museums, libraries, restaurants, hotels, and art galleries — each one a universe unto itself. It works primarily in the vein of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, and Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars. It’s also a kind of autobiography, as each of the destinations is a metaphor for the emotional locations I’ve visited: museums of longing, hotels of joy, cities of heartbreak. Whereas Children of the New World has ties to sci-fi, this new book is rooted in magical realism. All the same, I’m still working with my favorite topics: nostalgia, longing, memory, and love.

  **

  Alexander Weinstein is the Director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (Picador 2016). His fiction and translations have appeared in Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, World Literature Today, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prize. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and a freelance editor, and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe.

• rain taxi - www.raintaxi.com/the-problem-with-the-future-an-interview-with-alexander-weinstein/

  The Problem with the Future: An Interview with Alexander Weinstein

  photo by Jessica Spilos

  Interviewed by Garry Craig Powell

  Alexander Weinstein is the director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. His stories have received the Lamar York, Gail Crump, and New Millennium Prizes, have been nominated for Pushcart Prizes, and appear in the anthology New Stories from the Midwest. He is an associate professor of creative writing at Siena Heights University and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe. His collection, Children of the New World (Picador, $16), is one of the most exciting debuts of recent years. As The Atlantic puts it, “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.”

  Garry Craig Powell: In a recent interview with 0s&1s Reads, you cite the influence of filmmaker Charlie Kaufman and mention that in spite of his metaphysical concerns, he grounds his stories in a gritty world. It struck me, reading Children of the New World, that you do that too. Unlike some cerebral writers, including some that you acknowledge as influences, you create complex, well-rounded characters with whom we can empathize. In the title story, for example, a couple has to ‘delete’ their virtual son when his program is plagued by a virus—and incredibly, we feel sorry for them. You seem to want the reader not only to consider where the future is leading us, but also to explore universal human problems. Would you agree with that?

  Alexander Weinstein: Absolutely. I think the future is intrinsically linked with our universal human problems. In fact, it’s these very problems, and how we deal with them, which will determine our future. I set many of my stories in a gritty “realist” world, but one that is plagued by an overuse of technology, which is akin to the world we find ourselves living in now. The problems we have with our current technology often reveal our own human foibles, and it’s these new emotions of cyberspace which reveal our struggles. What is the emotion of an empty inbox? An unliked Post? An ignored dating app message? I think there’s a great loneliness that much of our society is running from, and we search for relief in our phones and computers, our online communities, our social networks of friends, the OK Cupid lovers we meet for awkward first dates. We are growing less able to keep ourselves entertained during down moments, so we fill our time by searching for Pokemon, but underneath it all are the same human questions we’ve always been asking: Who Am I? What am I doing here? How can I be loved? I think the challenge for humans remains the same as it has always been: to learn the skills of kindness, compassion, and love. Without these sacred skills, all technology can do is grow the shadows in our lives.

  GCP: On a philosophical level, most of the stories seem to be exploring the boundaries between empirical reality and what can be imagined and brought to virtual life—what Plato would have called Ideas. In “The Cartographers” a man falls in love not with his own projection, which is an old theme in literature, but someone else’s. That’s a fascinating new angle.

  AW: I was really interested in this ability for others to create virtual memories for us. In “The Cartographers” I explore this through Adam Woods, and the company he works for, which produces virtual memories that people can beam into their consciousness. While the technology is sci-fi, the story is also a metaphor for the way love relationships create memories in our minds. When I wrote the story, I’d just gone through a breakup with a woman I’d loved dearly. Without this other person in my life, the memories we’d shared often felt like phantoms. Who was this person I once loved? Did she still really exist? The answer, on a metaphysical level, was that this person didn’t still exist. She’d gone on to become a different person, an individual with new hopes and dreams which no longer involved me. And yet, there were still the memories of jokes we shared, replete with punchlines that no one else would ever understand. Movies and songs which have the ghosts of our times together hidden within them. There are the residues of our ex-lovers, unseen by anyone else, still shared across vast distances with people we may never speak to again.
  This became the narrative, which drove the story, of Cynthia and the narrator who still loves her even in her absence. And this idea, of falling in love with other people’s projections (à la beamed memories), is akin to how we fall in love with the real memories we create with others. In “The Cartographers” it just becomes more sinister, because of the awful memory company the main character has helped create.

  GCP: Most of the stories have a political dimension too; they often read as critiques of current human blindness and selfishness. For instance, there’s environmental catastrophe in “Heartland” and “Ice Age,” and the moral degradation of virtual pornography in “Heartland,” “Children of the New World,” “Migration,” and “The Pyramid and the Ass.” You’ve called your work “speculative fiction,” and this collection is set in the future, mostly the relatively proximate future. Why have you chosen to do that rather than write more stories with similar themes set in the present-day USA?

  AW: I don’t think the critique would be as clear. One of my central approaches to writing speculative fiction is to take an absurd situation, which we presently feel is normal, and then push it to an even further absurdity. It’s only in this light that we can see the reflection of the disturbing state of our present-day affairs.

  I came across an old story of mine that I’d written a decade ago. The main joke of the story is that a mother is telling her children about how she met their father online. The majority of memories the mother has all have to do with really funny links he sent her, a music download that she loved, etc.—and because of these superficial details she fell in love with the father. Reading it today, it’s hardly a dystopian story; it’s simply a realistic story about how people actually meet. Parents are already telling their kids about falling in love online—there’s nothing “frightening” or “dystopian” about this. So, the critique doesn’t work, because we already consider our dystopic state of affairs normal.

  In much the same way, the environmental catastrophes we’re presently seeing are considered “normal” though they’re horrific. Fracking has made drinking water flammable, families are dying from planned lead poisoning in Flint, Michigan, mountaintop removal is killing families throughout Appalachia, and oil/mining companies continue to denigrate Native American and indigenous rights throughout the world (see North Dakota Pipeline presently). This is horrific—and yet we somehow consider it normal. Realistic writing/reporting about this is vital, and I’m a big fan of Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco’s book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, where they visit what they call The Sacrifice Zones of America and report on the current state of our environmental calamity.

  However, in my fiction, I want to give an even further warning of where we’re heading. And so, in “Heartland,” you have people selling off their topsoil, and an underwater oil spill that has lasted over three-hundred days. These are just further extensions of what is already occurring, and by making it one step more “absurd” my hope is that we’ll be able to see our present state of affairs more clearly.

  GCP: In spite of the bleakness of that vision and the seriousness of your themes, one of the delights of the collection is its dry humor. In “Moksha,” for instance, you satirize those westerners who seek instantaneous enlightenment. Could you tell us more about the inspiration for that story?

  AW: The truth is: “Moksha” is really a satire of myself. I’ve always been interested in Eastern spirituality. I’m a big fan of Chogyam Trungpa, Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, Krishna Das, and I’m particularly interested in enlightenment and the spiritual pursuit to liberate ourselves (I’m a Buddhist at heart). During my teenage years, I imagined I’d end up going to India to become a yogi; study with the last living saints in a cave; give up all my worldly possessions; learn to levitate. And there’s still part of me that can see myself “disappearing” for some years at an ashram somewhere.

  And yet, I also realize that I’ve had a very idyllic vision of what spirituality looks like. Honestly, most of Western culture has an idyllic and simplified idea of what enlightenment entails. You find this watered-down enlightenment sold in mass quantity at yoga studios, high-priced shamanism retreats, DJ-fueled Ecstatic Dance parties, ayahuasca ceremonies, and self-empowerment seminars. There’s a hope for a quick fix—if only we have the money and right drugs for it.

  While I’ve always been critical about this peddling of spiritual materialism, it wasn’t until I went to Nepal that I came face-to-face with my own spiritual materialism. The thing is, Kathmandu is noisy, and dusty, and crowded, and everywhere you go you see these same Western yoga teachers, hashish-smoking backpackers, and fair-trade shop owners, all seeking the stalls filled with amazing Buddha statues, hand carved mirrors, beautiful yak scarves, and thangka paintings. And everyone is buying stuff! I found myself purchasing these beautiful items, too (they were so cheap!), in hopes of . . . well, in hopes of what? Perhaps to adorn my home with spiritual paintings and Buddha statues so to bring a little bit of that spirituality back to my daily life. And here I was, stuffing my bag with holy objects, just like all the other lost and wandering tourists—everyone seeking some piece of enlightenment.

  So, in Nepal, I realized a certain part of my spiritual search had come to an end. I wasn’t ever going to live in a Himalayan cave (I like electricity and a soft bed way too much), and I sure wasn’t going to find enlightenment so easily. Near the end of my trip to Nepal, I climbed the mountains and ended up at the Muktinath Temple (just like Abe did in “Moksha”) and I got to pass beneath the ice-cold waterspouts of the gods, which promise enlightenment. I’ll let you guess if it worked or not.

  GCP: As someone who’s also been to Nepal and Ladakh, and has tried to follow the Middle Way too, I’d say it’s not something you “achieve” for once and for all—it’s something that happens moment by moment, through attention. That may be an over-earnest answer!

  Another of my favorite stories is “Fall Line,” in which an extreme skier struggles to come to terms with his loss of fame after a near-fatal accident. Apart from the environmental situation, which isn’t as bad as that yet, and an invention that makes taking selfies even easier than it is now, that story could be set here and now. Again, it seemed to me that you were exploring an almost universal human problem. The ending is brilliant. In general your endings are very strong. You don’t usually resolve the conflict overtly, but end with an epiphany, particularly with epiphanies that connect the characters to meaningful moments of their lives or to nature, as Chekhov often does. Is that too far-fetched a comparison?

  AW: I’ll take a Chekhov comparison any day! He’s of course one of the great masters at the short story form, and has helped define traditional conflict as we understand it. And, it’s true, I do love the semi-epiphany. For example, in “Fall Line,” the character’s final decision is less epiphany than imbecility. He makes a choice, which the conflict hangs upon—whether to seek fame or actually change his life—and so, his decision is tied to the central conflict and his own hubris.

  In this way, while my stories are experimental, they’re also very traditional. I love the works of the great Russian writers like Chekhov and Tolstoy, and their ability to portray our human struggles and joys. And I love the Russian absurdists—Gogol, Kharms, and Bulgakov. Even within the Russian experimentalists, there’s a lineage of traditional narrative, conflict, and character development, which I find vital to my storytelling. It’s of course not the only way to tell a story, and I really admire the experimentalists who challenge traditional narrative—writers like Ishmael Reed, Michael Martone, Donald Barthelme, Tatyana Tolstaya, George Saunders, and many others.

  GCP: A couple of your stories do dispense with characters and scenes, and thus are perhaps veering more in the direction of experimentalists you mention who challenge traditional narrative. “Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary” and “A Brief History of the Failed Revolution” both purport to be scholarly writing. The latter particularly, with its MLA footnotes and parody, reminded me of David Foster Wallace. You have to be witty and imaginative to pull that off.

  AW: David Foster Wallace was a brilliant experimentalist who I deeply admire. His ability to do formalism helped me understand how to tackle stories like “Dictionary” and “Failed Revolution.” “Dictionary,” in particular, functions against narrative in many ways—each of the definitions are their own mini-story or prose poem, and the collection of them adds up to create a different effect than the traditional Freytagian Pyramid story. Borges is a writer who plays with this beautifully as well. Wit and humor seem to always factor into this—there’s a tongue-in-cheek tone you get when you take on a formalist story—because there’s an inherent voice you’re trying to copy (and often to satirize).

  GCP: One of the funniest stories is “The Pyramid and the Ass,” in which a future incarnation of George W. Bush is President again, unfortunately for Americans, and has invaded Tibet for its quartz crystals! Still more hilariously, the protagonist, Douglas, who is a courier of souls, is terrified above all of the Buddhist terrorists of the Sword of Transcendental Wisdom. Plus ça change . . . I suppose?

  AW: Yes, that particular story was written during the dark days of the Bush years. George W. Bush had just been “re-elected” (or elected for the first time, depending on how you count the stolen election) and it seemed like the horror of his presidency would last forever. We were in the early days of the “War Against Terror,” our country was invading Iraq while ceding leases to Halliburton, and America was seizing oil reserves (what’s new). Bush’s presidency was one of the great nightmares of my life to date.

  So, in the story there’s this war against the so-called Buddhist Terrorists. As we find out, they’re not really terrorists at all, just good folks trying to liberate people from technology and fight against an American government/corporation trying to coopt our souls. The inherent racism and Buddhist-phobia in the story plays into the present demonizing of Islam—and of our loss of knowledge about the great, spiritual history of the Sufis, for example, or the cultural heritage from the middle east.

  But, honestly, I’m just worried that the technology I invented in that story will become real, and George W. Bush will be able to clone into a new body and be “re-elected” due to a clone-bill passed by him and his cronies. God forbid!

  GCP: It could be even worse than that if a certain crypto-fascist is elected. I agree with you on the demonization of Islam; having spent eight years in the Gulf, I am aware of some of the riches of the culture, and Sufi mysticism and the great Persian poetry it inspired are some of the greatest glories.

  You have some very sad stories too, like “Rocket Night” and “Openness.” Again, apart from the technical innovations you’ve imagined, both of these are about problems that engage us today—how we deal with people who don’t fit in, and whether it’s possible for a romantic relationship to survive complete honesty.

  AW: Both of these are questions I still ask myself—particularly the latter one. I’m a big fan of the relationship/sex podcaster Dan Savage. One of his pieces of wisdom is that a relationship isn’t a deposition—total openness and revealing every detail of your soul to a partner shouldn’t be a prerequisite for a committed relationship. “Openness” ultimately asks this same question—can a relationship survive complete honesty? As a romantic, I want to say “Yes, of course!” But, over time, I’ve come to agree with Dan Savage.

  “Openness” also deals with our public level of disclosure. We’re being asked to continually be “authentic” and “honest” with the world through social media. There’s a demand to post our wedding pictures, baby pictures (only minutes after the birth), our relationship status, and our grief and joys on Facebook and Instagram. Similarly, we construct persona through dating apps and networking sites. All of these social media networks exert pressure on us to share the personal details of our lives with unknown masses. So the pressure on the characters in “Openness” isn’t merely romantic, but public/social as well.

  “Rocket Night” is my take on bullying culture. I think this is getting better, thanks to the anti-bullying work being done by my generation. But there’s a way that coaches, teachers, parents, and administration officials can conspire against our students who need the most support. Presently we’re seeing these kinds of battles for our most vulnerable students—such as Trans and LGBTQ students. You have a lot of conservative parents/school boards making life much harder for these children by trying to ensure bullying remains in place. For example, in Michigan, the religious right lobbied to put a stipulation into anti-bullying legislation which would allow bullying to be permitted when based on “personally and deeply held religious beliefs.” So, yes, the sadness within “Rocket Night” is all too present in our current society.

  GCP: The last story, “Ice Age” is a tour de force. At first sight, it’s the most familiar plot, set in an overtly post-apocalyptic future, in which men are reduced to hunting with bows, and bloodshed is promised. You set up the suspense in the classic way and then subvert it, which I thought very clever. Can you tell us why you did that?

  AW: I chose to end the story this way because I wanted to explore the themes of male-dominance and community more deeply. The “classic” way to end a fight between good and evil is to have a violent battle where good ultimately wins (think of every single modern-day superhero flick). But, in our lives, we rarely get to have these epic battles. We shuffle out of office buildings after being laid-off by draconian bosses; we sit on hold for ten minutes only to be told by a supervisor that the charge on our cable bill can’t be removed; we click a crying emoji on Facebook as our last whimper of protest. So rather than end the story with the expected violence and destruction of evil, I wanted to focus on the way the characters end up sabotaging their own community though their attachments to the consumerism of the old world.

  There’s a kind of classic, Norman Rockwellian Americana that I love to satirize. So I take a time-worn classic trope, like a family drama (in “Saying Goodbye to Yang”) but then subvert it with robots. In “Ice Age,” there’s this male-dominated Western narrative going on—the men with their bows and arrows, the threat of blood, the standoff between good and evil. Like you say, it’s a classic trope, and I find a lot of humor working with the kitsch of this—the wonkiness of this ridiculous male-driven world, but they’re all living in igloos!

  GCP: I hope Children of the New World has the success it deserves. And thanks for the interview, which was fun and thought-provoking.

  AW: Thanks so much for the wonderful questions—it was a pleasure!

Weinstein, Alexander. Children of the New World
Henry Bankhead
141.15 (Sept. 15, 2016): p76.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
* Weinstein, Alexander. Children of the New World. Picador. Sept. 2016.240p. ISBN 9781250098993. pap. $16; ebk. ISBN 9781250099006. F

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Weinstein's collection is the most engrossing work of fiction this reviewer has read since Dave Eggers's The Circle. Each story is set in the near future and extrapolates the devastating outcomes of familiar problems with technology or the environment. "Heartland" imagines a world where desperate families, having sold the very soil they need to survive, contemplate dark alternatives. The title story examines the emotional devastation following the collapse of a utopian virtual reality. "Migration" contrasts an unsafe landscape of devastation, with people living a largely home-based, confined digital life, and the sudden discovery of natural beauty. There is also a compelling examination throughout several stories of the intersection of religion and technology, culminating in the wickedly hilarious "The Pyramid and the Ass," which describes a world where procreation has been replaced by digital reincarnation. Using wit and intelligence, each story investigates the negative effects of technology gone awry and the subsequent effect on society. VERDICT Like a prose version of the Netflix series Black Mirror, this volume encapsulates a brave and imaginative examination of possible futures. Highly recommended for all readers. [$ee Prepub Alert, 3/21/16.1--Henry Bankhead, San Rafael P.L., CA

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Bankhead, Henry. "Weinstein, Alexander. Children of the New World." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 76. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA463632491&it=r&asid=e7fb10091a2ebe398bbcf30638a8213b. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A463632491

Children of the New World
263.31 (Aug. 1, 2016): p47.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
* Children of the New World

Alexander Weinstein. Picador, $16 trade paper (240p) ISBN 978-1-250-09899-3

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Touching on virtual families, climate change, implanted memories, and more, Weinstein's debut collection of digital-age sci-fi stories is scary, recognizable, heartbreaking, witty, and absolutely human. In "Saying Goodbye to Yang," Jim has to shut down a malfunctioning Yang--a humanoid who has been a "Big Brother" to Jim's adopted daughter for three years. In "The Cartographers," Adam designs and sells manufactured memories, until he gets so hooked on testing his software that he can no longer tell which memories are his own. "Heartland" shows a Midwest where topsoil is a precious commodity, and when a father loses his job "installing gardens," he resorts to exploiting the cuteness of his children to make ends meet. In the virtual-driven world of the title story, a couple lose their digital children to a reboot when they download a virus in the "Dark City." The disturbing and darkly funny "Rocket Night" features parents who gather annually to decide which least-liked child in the elementary school will be launched on a rocket to space. Complete with footnotes from fictional future publications and technology that is just one leap away, this is mind-bending stuff. Weinstein's collection is full of spot-on prose, wicked humor, and heart. Agent: Leigh Feldman, Leigh Feldman Literary Agency. (Sept.)

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Children of the New World." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460285664&it=r&asid=56fcaa3dbb442551a783c7c9c6d2c384. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460285664

Children of the New World
Donna Seaman
112.22 (Aug. 1, 2016): p24.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
* Children of the New World. By Alexander Weinstein. Sept. 2016. 240p. Picador, paper, $22.99 (9781250098993).

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

The "new world" Weinstein imagines in this mind-blowing debut collection of stealthily speculative stories is our world fast-forwarded to the eviscerated future we seem hell-bent on creating. The basics of families remain, along with bone-deep social expectations and the welter of emotions that guide and derail us. But in "Heartland," people are so destitute they've sold off all the topsoil, turning once-fertile farmland into a dead zone. In "Saying Good-bye to Yang," procreation seems to have ceased, replaced by cloning and androids. In the title story, a couple immerses themselves in phony digital memories of children they never had. In other tales, such beamed memories, "electric joy," are the insidious new narcotics, and enlightenment, via data shots to the cranium, can be purchased, though it's illegal in the States, sending one young seeker to Nepal. In the vein of George Saunders, Rick Bass, and Alex Shakar, Weinstein writes with stirring particularity, unfailing sensitivity, and supercharged imagination, creating nuanced stories harboring a molten core of astutely satirical inquiries. Sparking disquieting thoughts about how vulnerable our brains are to electronic manipulation and how eventually consciousness itself might be colonized by corporate and governmental entities, Weinstein's brilliantly original, witty, and provocative tales explore the malleability of memory and self, the fragility of intimacy and nature, forging a ravishingly powerful, cautionary vision.--Donna Seaman

Seaman, Donna

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Children of the New World." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA460761623&it=r&asid=39c14328269e54aaa66b51deac8c8200. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.

Gale Document Number: GALE|A460761623

Bankhead, Henry. "Weinstein, Alexander. Children of the New World." Library Journal, 15 Sept. 2016, p. 76. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA463632491&asid=e7fb10091a2ebe398bbcf30638a8213b. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017. "Children of the New World." Publishers Weekly, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 47. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460285664&asid=56fcaa3dbb442551a783c7c9c6d2c384. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017. Seaman, Donna. "Children of the New World." Booklist, 1 Aug. 2016, p. 24. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA460761623&asid=39c14328269e54aaa66b51deac8c8200. Accessed 8 Apr. 2017.

• atlantic
  https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/09/cautionary-tales-from-the-future/499607/
  Word count: 1762

  Cautionary Tales From the Future

  Alexander Weinstein’s collection of short stories, Children of the New World, presents a bleak, brilliant view of humanity fully in technology’s thrall.
  Picador / Jessica Spilos / Zachary Bickel / The Atlantic

  Sophie Gilbert Sep 13, 2016 Culture

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  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. 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. 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. 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.

  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. 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. 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. But Children of the New World is no less ominous. Weinstein subtly infuses his cautionary tales about the price of submitting so credulously to technological progress with a sense of inevitability.
  Related Story

  The Future Is Almost Now

  The 13 stories are set in broadly different visions of the future, some of them ravaged by climate change, others considerably more fanciful. (“The Pyramid and the Ass” imagines a world in which Buddhist reincarnation has been co-opted by a corporation named Soul Co. and George W. Bush has been president for 10 consecutive life cycles.) But the common thread is that humans seem to be remarkably unchanged. 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. And, sometimes, to moments of enhanced humanity.

  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. 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. 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. He’s also liable to malfunction while not under warranty. 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. 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.

  Weinstein dedicates the book to his son, and almost all of the stories are shot through with parental anxiety and instinctual fear. In “Heartland,” set in a world where climate change has given Indiana a permanent, rainy fall that “turns our backyards into clay pits,” children have become the ultimate commodity in a community reduced to penury. A father drives his son home after a TV contest where the child has flunked a trivia round and blown the prospect of several thousand dollars. A friend consoles the father by suggesting that he can make substantial cash by “putting photos online … just pictures of them in the bathtub, Cara changing her diaper. Mild stuff, practically family photos.”
  “A woman who looked like my mother transmogrified in the living room, saying she’d been robbed and needed our help to pay for groceries.”

  The father is repulsed. For him, this represents an uncrossable line, though that day alone he’s schlepped his kid to a ridiculous TV contest where the boy had to eat worms, and filmed him repeatedly falling over in hopes of striking YouTube gold. He’s horrified not by the thought of posting photos of his kids online—an innocent act millions of parents do every day—but of doing so knowing the photos are sold to predators. Deftly, “Heartland” indicts the mothers and fathers who inhabit this troubled future, manipulating their children for financial gain, but also raises uncomfortable questions about the exhibitionistic habits of many contemporary parents.

  Weinstein’s realism about human nature is often tempered by wicked humor. “Children of the New World,” an otherwise moving story about a couple who build a home in a virtual world and are shocked when one of them gets virtually pregnant, includes a brilliantly funny scene in which their “house” gets corrupted by a virus. First a naked man appears in the bathroom, pushing penile-enhancement drugs. Then comes a man from Ghana who bought gifts for the kids and needs the parents’ credit-card number to pay for them. Next, “a woman who looked like my mother transmogrified in the living room, saying she’d been robbed and needed our help to pay for groceries.” The real monsters in the world, the narrator concludes, are “the hackers and scammers, faceless men and women who destroy lives for the sake of testing a virus.” But given that he likely picked up the virus while frequenting the Dark City (a kind of virtual pleasure zone), is he totally blameless? Aren’t we all prone, the story asks, to weakness in different ways, just as we’ve ever been?

  Some of the oldest and nastiest human tendencies, “The New World Authorized Dictionary” makes clear, have blossomed forth in Weinstein’s imagined future. The story, written in encyclopedic form, defines slang words that have entered the popular vocabulary. “Mush” is a verb made popular by a rapper named G-Spot, meaning “heterosexual intercourse wherein the female has her face pressed firmly against a surface (usually floor) in a forceful manner.” A “brainflea” is “a particularly viral promo” that projects itself into the upper right quadrant behind the eyelid and becomes impossible to dismiss. “Orange-blossoms” are bombs able to “liquidate largely populated areas.” Racism and classism, too, seem to be thriving in the New World. In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the narrator instantly categorizes a man he meets as being the kind to have a bumper sticker saying “We Clone Our Own.”
  Above all, Weinstein is curious about what happens when technology advances so quickly that ethics don’t have a chance to catch up.

  In zanier moments, Weinstein simultaneously scrutinizes and satirizes the perpetual human desire to find enlightenment, inner bliss, and true love. Several stories feature a kind of brain-web interface that permits communication in non-verbal form. In one, humans can beam imagined memories of experiences they never had into their own brains. In others, they can experience transcendence via data “shot through their crown chakras for five thousand rupees a shot,” or unveil layers of themselves to strangers in near proximity. Perhaps this is an anxiety particular to writers—how redundant will they be when information is simply winked into another person’s brain? But above all, Weinstein is curious about what happens when technology advances so quickly that ethics don’t have a chance to catch up, leaving humans to flounder in situations they haven’t evolved to cope with. In “Migration,” the extent of sexual pleasure online has so surpassed the physical act that men and women have become impotent. Few seem to realize the ramifications.

  The shortest work in the book, and the most haunting, is called “Rocket Night.” Over five brief pages, a narrator describes an annual fall event at his daughter’s school, “the night when parents, students, and administrators gather to place the least-liked child in a rocket and shoot him to the stars.” The banal, arbitrary nature of the ritual seems directly inspired by Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” a short story that appeared almost 60 years ago in The New Yorker in which residents of a village prepare for a festive summer event that ends in the stoning to death of a local resident picked at random. When the story was published, so many upset readers wrote in, convinced it was non-fiction, that the magazine crafted a standard response. The story, editors explained, was intended to show “how the forces of belligerence, persecution, and vindictiveness are, in mankind, endless and traditional, and that their targets are chosen without reason.”

  But in “Rocket Night” the targets aren’t random. They’re the children who are so typically the victims of other children. Daniel, the boy chosen this time around, is small, lonely, and poor; “the mildewed scent of thrift stores” clings to his corduroys, and he’s prone to chewing the ends of pencils and picking his nose. Unwilling to get into the rocket, he clings to his mother’s skirts, and the other grade-schoolers are summoned to pull him away. The principal assures Daniel’s parents that he has a microphone inside the rocket, which will enable him to talk to himself as he travels through the universe.

  The point of Daniel’s mission is unknown—he’s just a pawn in a much larger experiment. In that sense, perhaps, he represents all the children being raised on untested technology, whose power to change us—or not—is anybody’s guess. Pausing to look at the stars, the narrator considers all the unpopular children flying through space imprisoned in their shiny cells: “I imagined them drifting alone up there, speaking into their microphones, reporting to themselves about the depths of the unknown.”

• boston globe
  https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/09/25/alexander-weinstein-characters-inhabit-high-tech-future-with-timeless-human-problemscq/iWMcJ2kQVWunUjZeKna6iJ/story.html
  Word count: 898

  Alexander Weinstein’s characters inhabit a high-tech future with timeless human problems

  By Ethan Gilsdorf Globe Correspondent September 26, 2016

  Andy and his girlfriend, Katie, are connected to a kind of telekinetic social-media network that links everyone’s brains. The system gives them instant access to each other’s various “layers” of thoughts, memories, images. After logging off during an off-the-grid weekend in Maine, the couple struggles to connect. “So, I stood there, looking out the living room window,” Andy says, “trying to remember how people used to talk back in the days when we knew nothing about each other.”

  Such is the netherworld of a not-too-distant future evoked in “Openness,” one of the stories in Alexander Weinstein’s “Children of the New World.” In this haunting and prescient debut collection, Weinstein evokes a vaguely dystopian, domestic existence where virtual reality, cybernetics, and social media are second nature. Like today we are disconnected despite being connected. We feel the insidious reach of technology, corporate forces, and climate change tightening into a chokehold. Over 13 tales, he steeps us in a realm of alternate realities close to our own, but each with a thought-provoking twist.

  In the title story, a childless couple navigates a virtual life called the New World where they create their own digital offspring, but end up having to perform the heart-puncturing chore of deleting them after they are corrupted by hackers and viruses. In “The Cartographers,” a character working for a company that creates synthetic memories has trouble differentiating between scenes from his own life story and fake ones. In some tales, people send text messages by blinking. They suffer from “downloading anxiety” and “AISDD (Autoimmune Streaming Detachment Dysfunction).” In “Heartland,’’ they watch reality shows like “Dream Girls” where “frumpy wives” undergo reconstructive surgery “to appear identical” to their husband’s preferred movie stars. In “Moksha,” a backpacker journeys to Nepal seeking data implants that provide illegal spiritual bliss, only to discover their addictive qualities: “Enlightenment, it turned out, didn’t last long.”

  Rarely does Weinstein, director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, tag his futures to any specific date. While the world his characters inhabit is more tech-infused than our own, their personal challenges are timeless. In direct, unadorned prose, the mostly first-person narrators recount their anxieties and fears about raising good kids, providing for families, and forming meaningful, intimate relationships. Husbands and wives still squabble, go to Whole Foods, and take out the recycling.
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  One of Weinstein’s most affecting stories, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” concerns a family that’s purchased a robotic Big Brother/babysitter for their daughter. “Without realizing it, I had slipped into thinking of Yang as my own son, imagining that one day he’d be raking leaves for his own wife and children,” says the father. “It occurred to me then that Yang’s time with us was limited. Eventually, he’d be shut down and stored in the basement.” To avoid heartbreak, don’t love your androids.

  In “Fall Line,” narrator Ronnie Hawks faces the puzzle of growing old with grace. “When people still remembered me, I could end a night with a snowbunny,” pines the former celeb extreme skier who once made his fortune via “Third Eye,” a YouTube-like viral video stream that broadcasts his exploits to followers via special contact lenses. After a life-threatening wipe-out, “I watched my feed drop below a million,” he says, and now works odd jobs at ski resort about to be shuttered due to lack of snow. “Ever since the Big Thaw, anyone wanting diamonds needs to but a ticket to Dubai and shred indoor slopes.” Nature-in-peril often peeks in at the corners of Weinstein’s tech-filled world.

  Some of this territory will sound familiar to speculative fiction fans of Philip K. Dick and Neal Stephenson, or lesser-knowns like Emily St. John Mandel (“Station Eleven”), Charles Yu (“How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe”), and Kevin Wilson (“Tunneling to the Center of the Earth”). One senses a hint of George Saunders, without his absurdist whimsy. If Weinstein has a weakness, it’s that many of his stories sound the same dire note of a future that’s closer than we’d like.

  That said, the stories of “Children of the New World” feel cautionary, without being didactic. This is best seen in “Migration,” which speaks to our house-bound, online shopping culture. Trucks attacked by refugees deliver food to dilapidated suburbs, whose residents, hooked by VR goggles and bodysuits, “haven’t been outside in years.” When Max, one family’s anti-social game-addicted teenage son, escapes on his bike, the father retrieves him. They see a herd of deer “migrating past the rotten swing set of an English Tudor.” If there’s any hope, it’s that their neighborhood is returning to the earth.

  “I want to tell Max that I love him; that he’ll always be my son; that somehow everything will be okay again,” the dad muses. “But maybe that’s too far from the truth.”

  CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD

  By Alexander Weinstein. Picador, 229 pp., paperback, $16

• seattle times
  http://www.seattletimes.com/entertainment/books/alexander-weinsteins-children-of-the-new-world-finds-some-eerily-plausible-futures/
  Word count: 623

  Alexander Weinstein’s ‘Children of the New World’ finds some eerily plausible futures
  Originally published October 7, 2016 at 6:05 am

  In his collection of 13 short stories, “Children of the New World,” author Alexander Weinstein explores our relationship with technology and its impact on our lives.
  By David Wright
  Special to The Seattle Times

  The timely, nuanced stories in Alexander Weinstein’s “Children of the New World” (Picador paperback original, 240 pp., $16) are some of the most brilliantly disconcerting fiction in recent memory, stranding the reader in 13 eerily plausible futures. In riveting scenarios that call to mind the cult BBC TV series “Black Mirror,” Weinstein deftly explores our evolving relationship with technology and its repercussions on our inner and outer lives.

  In the poignant first story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the family’s android baby-sitter suffers a sudden, fatal malfunction one morning at the breakfast table. Past warranty, his circuits irreparably fried, Yang is clearly for the scrap heap, yet his survivors struggle to understand the emotional aftermath of their loved one’s death.

  In the title story, a couple’s existential investment in virtual reality bears un­expected fruit in a pair of beloved imaginary children. These parents’ joy is threatened when their forays into a virtual red-light district fling open their door to terrifying, fully dimensional spam and malware that wreaks havoc on their happy home. Describing the lure of this make-believe world, they observe, “We were like babies. Like Adam and Eve, … we were free to experience a physical connection that we’d always longed for in the real world but had never been able to achieve. Who can blame us for being reckless?”
  Author appearance
  Alexander Weinstein

  The author of “Children of the New World” will appear at 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 13, at Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Co., 1521 10th Ave.; free (206-624-6600 or elliottbaybook.com).

  As Weinstein’s characters grapple with increasingly attenuated daily lives, their longings, quandaries and follies are our own. They worry about the world they are leaving to their children, and like us they struggle to understand and find meaning in a culture where ingenuity outpaces wisdom, and where neither love, dreams, spirituality, nor consciousness escapes commodification. If you’ve ever suffered through a crashed hard drive or struggled to unplug over the weekend, you’re already living in a Weinstein story.

  Some of his people dwell amid the ravages of this culture, such as the family in “Heartland,” stuck in a blighted clay belt where all the topsoil has been sold off and working-class families strive to make ends meet in an economy buoyed by funny home videos and porn. In “Migration,” a son rebels against a world of networked, virtual body-suited shut-ins by brazenly riding his bike through the deserted streets to what once was the mall.

  As bleak as these futures are, truly macabre moments are rare, as in “Rocket Night,” a grim little fable of space-age ostracism reminiscent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” The darkest dystopia is approached obliquely, as with the unsettling neologisms in “Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary” which provide glimpses of a ghastly future society pitiably akin to our own.

  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 that suggests we might be getting a sneak peak at an annual installment of The Best American Short Stories circa 2050. The resulting cautionary tales are superlatively moving and thought-provoking, imbued with disarming pathos and a palpable sense of wonder and loss.

• NY Times
  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/09/books/review/alexander-weinstein-children-of-the-new-world.html?_r=0
  Word count: 861

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  Book Review | Fiction
  They Deleted Their Kids: Stories Orbit Tech-Obsessed Lives

  By JOHN WILWOLOCT. 7, 2016
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  Alexander Weinstein Credit Jessica Spilos

  CHILDREN OF THE NEW WORLD
  Stories
  By Alexander Weinstein
  229 pp. Picador. Paper, $16.

  The most disturbing stories about the future may be less about what could happen, given unforeseen circumstances, and more about what should happen given the way things are right now.

  The haunting visions of a sad tomorrow in Alexander Weinstein’s excellent first collection, “Children of the New World,” fit that category. Inspired by the author’s anxiety over our increasingly virtual lives, these 13 stories artfully slam an unchecked obsession with technology and affirm the beauty of reality’s texture.

  Perhaps the best expression of those qualities arrives in “Migration,” an unsettling and touching story that centers on a small family whose lives are so thoroughly conducted online that they “haven’t been outside in years.”

  It unfolds from the father’s perspective. He’s a literature professor at a virtual university who’s having a pathetic affair with a bronzed student avatar named Kira. His wife, meanwhile, designs digital landscapes for places like Whole Foods’ online corporate headquarters. (Her ­e-­lover, naturally, is a muscular 20-something gardener named Rick.)

  The marriage works, sort of, but their son, Max, is not O.K. A middle schooler who was subjected to virtual bullying, Max has grown tired of video games and now sulks about in a hockey mask to signify his sympathy with the “angry ­anti-tech youth” movement.
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  One night, Max’s dad finds him in the garage, secretly inflating the tires on an old bicycle. Going for a ride would be an act of radical rebellion. “I grab his arm,” Max’s dad tells us. “It’s the first time I’ve touched my son in months, and the shock of his skin beneath mine suddenly reminds me of what it was like to hold him as a child.”

  Max later makes his two-wheeled ­escape, and his father finds him alone in the parking lot of a long-abandoned ­shopping plaza, playing with a real tennis ball instead of his standard virtual game of Tennis. Before the story closes with an unexpected encounter with the sublime, Max marvels at the authenticity of our imperfect world.

  “You know, whenever I play Tennis, the ball always bounces smoothly and makes the same sound,” he tells his father. “But that’s not what happens in real life. It bounces differently.”

  “Children of the New World” considers other tensions future families may confront. In perhaps the book’s most affecting story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” the strange calculus around reviving a broken beloved robot mixes home appliance repair with the health care industrial complex. “He’ll check Yang out and fix him for a third of what those guys at Q-Fix will charge you,” a helpful neighbor tells Yang’s owner. “Tell Russ I sent you.”

  Later, in “Heartland,” we visit a desperate world so stripped of natural resources that even soil is scarce. “The land’s gone, the water’s going,” one character laments. “We’re done for.” If the day comes when children are the only thing of value we still produce, the story ultimately wonders, how far might we go to capitalize on that value?

  Finally, the book’s title story beautifully depicts the real grief that may one day accompany shattered virtual lives. In this case, the software running a couple’s virtual children gets infected with a computer virus. To save the system, the children must be deleted, and the couple turn to a live support group at a local community center to cope with the loss.

  There, they find redemption and hope in rediscovering something this author deeply believes: There will always be a few things we need that we won’t ever find online.

  “We pull strangers into our embrace and hold them tightly against us,” Weinstein writes. “There’s nothing electronic about the gesture, no hum to the body, only the warmth of their breathing and the beating of their hearts.”

  John Wilwol’s reviews have appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle and Newsday.

  A version of this review appears in print on October 9, 2016, on Page BR16 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: They Deleted Their Kids. Today's Paper|Subscribe
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• michigan quarterly review
  http://www.michiganquarterlyreview.com/2016/12/on-children-of-the-new-world-an-interview-with-alexander-weinstein/
  Word count: 3258

  On “Children of the New World”: An Interview with Alexander Weinstein
  December 21, 2016 by Allison Peters in Interview

  What are your dreams for the future? For the Earth, for yourself, for generations to come? What values do you want to live on, and what phantoms of 2016 do you hope will go extinct?

  Imagine breathing the air of twenty, thirty, forty years from now. In this future (as in our present, arguably), what might the consequences be if the more we kept connecting through technology, the less connected we felt to humanity? Have our decades-long chains of accelerating change, conquering expanses, overworking ourselves, and embracing the loneliest ways of being “social” exhausted our spirits?

  In his breakthrough collection of near-future-set dystopian short stories, Children of the New World (Picador, 2016), Alexander Weinstein takes on all these questions and more through an evocative whirlwind of gutting fiction. Alexander describes in his must-watch Talk at Google the catalyst for starting Children of the New World ten years ago: a realization that many humans were becoming emotionally attached to technology (i.e. when people say I love my phone or I couldn’t live without my phone). “Technology exacerbates opportunities for loneliness,” Weinstein says. It’s this externally-connected, internally-disconnected state of being that sets the premise for a society eerily similar to ours today–one in which a devastating chronology begins with the first story in Children of the New World.

  “What if we had technologies that helped us transcend our egos?” Alexander asks in his Google Talk. Perhaps, consciously or not, we’ve been pursuing elsewhere for too long the essence of what’s been waiting patiently within us all along. Maybe now, together, we need to undo.

  I recently had the opportunity to ask Weinstein my most pressing questions about his book and for his thoughts on the future of our society given the high-tech, fast-paced present reality. His responses are vital, inspiring, and relevant, ripe for us at this moment in time.

  *

  Congratulations on your debut book, Children of the New World. I enjoyed it immensely, and it also terrified me. The collection offers a look into our future from the starting point of our current cultural, emotional, technological trajectory. How can we change or transcend the path we’re on now to prevent your fictional future from becoming reality? What do we humans need to move forward in a more sustainable, positive direction?

  It’s a question I think a great deal about — especially as my fiction becomes reality (recently I heard they’re working on eye-screen contact lenses and temporary digital tattoos which will allow us to carry our interface on our bodies). I think one step towards preventing the futures I write about is for us to become less attached to our devices. Right now we’re in the binge drinking stage of technological addiction. There are emails to check, Facebook posts to like, Instagram photos to upload, Tinder/Grinder profiles to swipe, emojis to learn, and endless text messages. I find myself checking my phone five times a day — twenty, thirty. At stoplights, I see other drivers, sending off one more message before the light turns green. Next to us in the restaurant is a family eating dinner in silence as they individually play with their smartphones. And at bus stops around the world, grown men and women are playing tiny games on their screens like children.

  So the first step of recovery is acknowledging we’ve become addicted. From there I think we’ll need to take concrete steps towards recovery. Going for a walk down the street without checking our phones, leaving our smartphones at home, calling instead of texting, meeting romantic partners by going out to social gathering rather than logging onto social networks. This will likely sound/feel Luddite to many, and for those of us attempting this feat, I imagine we’ll get the itch to launch angry birds at pigs every now and again, but I believe it’ll be the start of reconnecting with ourselves and each other. We’ll rediscover things like gardening, dinner parties, even merely the ability to sit alone at a café and look out a window with contentment again.

  The near-demise of the spirit of humanity seems to be directly connected to humans’ own devaluation of love (a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy). What role can you see technology (social media in particular) playing as it develops not to overthrow in-person connection but to supplement it more naturally/effortlessly as it was intended? What are your hopes for what the future might look like given humanity’s ever-improving technological capability and capacity for both goodness/sanity and evil/madness?

  I was recently asked a variation of this question at a talk I gave at Google: What kind of technology could I envision that would help humanity? I tend to think that the most basic answer to this question is: technology to help create clean drinking water, and clean energy technologies which can supplant oil and coal, etc. So essentially, functional technology whose aim is to solve our most fundamental environmental problems.

  As for the social level — I’ve been envisioning a vast network of social care organizations which are funded by celebrities, sports stars, CEO benefactors, etc. Essentially it’d be creating a kind of second society — one wherein benefactors contributed towards causes they felt strongly about (arts programs in the community, universal healthcare, free education, after-school sports programs, homeless shelters, community gardens) and individuals could sign up and contribute to this network. It would be a highly organized and elaborate nonprofit which created a socioeconomic system akin to Denmark, The Netherlands, France, etc. As an individual, I could pay a certain amount towards this system and then get the benefits of health care, free education for my children, etc. If I fell below a certain income bracket, I could get these benefits for free.

  For something this massive to work, it would require a huge amount of interconnection between benefactors, individuals, and the already established nonprofit and community organizations which need funding. Until I visited Google, I thought: yes, but this idea is simply too massive to organize and oversee. However, it occurred to me that this kind of vast organization is precisely what places like Google and Yahoo already have. So I suppose, if you’re asking me to dream big, I envision that these tech companies might turn their attention towards becoming a kind of second-socioeconomic system, working towards the benefits of clean energy, world hunger, universal health care, free education, and social justice rather than marketing.

  You describe your book as humor-based and hopeful for humanity. What role do you think humor plays in literature for getting across serious messages to a perhaps otherwise apathetic audience?

  Humor helps the heart to open. And heartfelt laughter leads us towards greater connection with those around us. If you can find a way to share humor with others, then there’s an openness towards greater listening and compassion. With the serious topics I write about (environmental collapse, corporate avarice, western colonialism, electronic isolation, etc.) there’s a way such stories can calcify the heart if one isn’t careful. I noticed this in my teaching — if I’m just giving my students the disturbing facts about humanity without humor, it can lead to depression, discouragement, and a deeper political/social apathy. So, humor seems to restore our humanity to us — it allows us to deal with suffering with a more open heart.

  In “Migration,” the character Max wears a hockey mask as he rides his bike to Toys “R” Us, and after his father finds him, as the two spot the majestic deer, Max says, “Wow,” to which his father replies, “I know.” With these tiny three words of dialogue, you say so much about the differing levels of hope and disillusionment between the generations. As we all get older, how do you think we can maintain the childlike “wow” reaction?

  Maintaining the childlike “wow” is a general life goal for me. I find that my teaching often revolves around this critical skill. I teach a course called Contemplation and Action, where alongside contemplative practices like meditation, yoga, and eastern spirituality, we practice dance, theater, art, and song. It’s amazing to see how many of these childhood joys students have already lost by the age of eighteen. As we grow into adults, we somehow leave these wonderful aspects of life behind. We become afraid of our voices and so we no longer sing, we think we’re awful artists and so we don’t draw anymore, we move in very scripted and socially accepted ways rather than exploring the range of dance and movement which we once did as children. I see this as a great loss — one which echoes the demands of a society that values commodification and efficiency rather than creativity and play.

  So, in my classes, we begin to dance again, and to sing, and to make art — and over time, the students begin to open up and find they love these things which they abandoned way back in grade school. I have one exercise that I do during the autumn. On one of those beautiful days when it’s raining leaves, we go outside as a class and practice a game of trying to catch the most leaves before they hit the ground. It’s amazing to see the immediate return to play that happens. Suddenly all these rather serious athletes, math majors, nursing students, and business kids are running around and playing again, their voices ringing through the fall day. There’s a lightness to the group, they’re laughing again, and for a moment they’ve returned to that sense of play inherent within us.

  So these kinds of exercises can help return us to our childhood sense of wonder. There are of course many other methods too: falling in love, becoming a parent, getting out into nature, meditating, psychedelics, hiking, etc. are all powerful ways to rediscover what it means to be alive.

  In the titular story “Children of the New World,” the character Bill says, “‘We all have to reboot this,’ … he motions to the room with his open palms, ‘This world, with all its pain and loss. This is where we learn to love again.’” I love how at the end he notes, “Human contact is all there really is.” If rebooting isn’t an option, where do we go from here to heal our inherent viruses and better our natural and societal environment?

  Compassion and empathy seem a good place to start. Helping out wherever and however you can. This is difficult because I think many of us feel economically pressed these days. We are working two to three jobs, there are daily needs to see to, we barely have time for ourselves it seems. Adding to this is the inherent narcissism involved in our devices (we spend our free time putting filters onto photos so to post highlights from our lives onto social networks, ad infinitum). So, again, I think getting away from our devices and finding ways to re-engage with community is vital. There are a great deal of people suffering, and a great many ways to volunteer our time to help others. To do this means to begin to shrug off the gospel of survival-of-the-fittest capitalism and extend our time and resources to help others have a better life. It’s a big task, but I think this is the human reboot that can help our world become a better place.

  Elon Musk has referred to humans creating artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon.” In “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” we get the sense that Yang is a truly helpful robot and close with his human family. What are your thoughts on AI, and how do you hope humans can be proactively practical about developing future technologies for society?

  Yang is a nice “boy” and a very good-hearted robot. That said, I’m completely terrified of him! I’m not a big fan of AI technology, even down to Siri on my phone. I mean, it’s nice that I have someone to talk to these days, but I find Siri creepy. There’s great interest in AI and robotics to make our lives easier (note how technology is always selling us on new advances with this line: it’ll make your life easier!). But I think going down the AI road is a big mistake. We’ve barely scratched the surface of what it means to be human. I don’t think we’re in the best position to create alternate non-human intelligences.

  What was the writing process like for you? Is there a specific place or time of day where or when you feel most productive?

  I tend to always have paper close at hand — because I find that when stories suddenly “bite” I want to get them onto land as soon as possible. I write by hand first — it allows me to be much looser and more experimental in the first draft. This way, I can make a mess on the page without worrying about it. Then I take each story from the handwritten page to the computer, and from there I’m usually drafting/revising/editing the piece anywhere from eight to a dozen times. My stories take six months to a year to reach completion. Luckily, I have at least four or five stories working at a time, all in various stages of completion, so I don’t really notice how long it takes for each story’s gestation period.

  I also have a habit of stopping whatever I’m doing when I get a story idea, and writing for as long as I can. This might mean that if I’m driving, I have to pull over to the side of the road (somewhere safe) and write for an hour. Or I might be getting ready to go to sleep — and I’ll have a flash of the plot of a short story. Rather than go to sleep, I’ll turn the light back on, get out my journal and begin writing (sometimes for the next two to three hours) even though I have to teach class in the morning.

  Being at home tends to be my ideal. I don’t usually enjoy writing in coffee shops or in public — I find it too distracting. That said, as I’ve been working on my new book, The Lost Traveler’s Tour Guide, I’ve been writing in public places while traveling. The book is comprised of tour guide entries that describe fantastical cities, museums, libraries, restaurants, hotels, and art galleries — each one a universe unto itself. Since the format is a fictional tour guide, traveling and being out in public seems to be aiding my process.

  The final story of your collection, “Ice Age,” ends with the line, “drunken men, spoiling what once was our community.” This seems to sum up the warning underneath the future realism stories of Children of the New World. Spiritual teacher Barry Long once said, “The future will be not man’s world, not woman’s world, but love’s world. The only hope is woman.” As stewards of good nature and love on this planet, what do you believe women can do to prevent humanity from the likely futures depicted in your book?

  I really like this question, and it’s a deeply complicated one. There’s certainly a brand of American masculinity which I find abhorrent. This is the privileged, white male, drunken frat brother/bro-dog, business-major mentality — an ideology full of classism, racism, misogyny, homophobia, privilege, rape-culture, xenophobia, and relentless narcissism. And while there are plenty of business majors, frat brothers, and sports fanatics who are wonderful people, these particular groups do seem to nurture this particular brand of ugly American masculinity. You spot these folks during football season in college towns — white dude-bros with their shirts off, hooting and hollering at passing women and cars, with the entitled belief that the world belongs to them. These are the kind of men who think feminism is a bad word, that men are naturally the head of the household, and that the world is separated between the weak and the strong. Behind this mentality is a lineage of white colonialism and male privilege, one which deeply disturbs me. And it’s this toxic form of masculinity that I’m referencing in Ice Age.

  The history of misogyny is clear: women and their rights have been aggressively suppressed throughout human history by men. Patriarchy is an ugly beast, one which is systematically destroying the world socially, economically, politically, and environmentally. And I have a lot of hope for a future which embraces feminism, one wherein a feminist sensibility gets to lead us for a long time. Because, frankly, men have historically fucked up the world.

  The real difference, as I see it, is about systems of ideology. If we’re to be somewhat rudimentary, on one side you have the power-hungry cosmology which is interested in hierarchies of power, domination, authoritarianism, exploiting nature and humans, puritanism, orthodoxy, brute force, war, survival-of-the-fittest capitalism, and harbors a lack of appreciation for the arts and the erotic. On the other side, you have an ideology which believes in cooperation and compassion, stewardship of the Earth, helping those in need, group thinking and communal experience, peace, art, creativity, the erotic, and caring for nature and human justice. And both men and women can fall into either camp of ideology. So, I believe that supporting this second life-nurturing ideology, and identifying and constantly refuting the domination-ideology, is the way we will create a much better future.

  Perhaps a more accurate way to categorize the particular destructive ideology we’re talking about is one which Ginsberg discusses in his epic poem “Howl.” Ginsberg terms it Moloch the destroyer, with its fingers of armies, and its mind of pure machinery. He’s speaking of the corporate-empire builders. The challenge then, is to overcome these internal and external ideological power-hungry demons — something that, as a culture, we haven’t seemed capable of yet. “Ice Age” ends with that statement about drunken men ruining what was the community, because they are selling out to a model of old-world capitalism. In turn, they are dooming their community to a future much like the one we have today.

  *

  Alexander Weinstein is the Director of The Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing and the author of the short story collection Children of the New World (Picador, 2016). His fiction and translations have appeared in Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Notre-Dame Review, Pleiades, PRISM International, World Literature Today, and other journals. He is the recipient of a Sustainable Arts Foundation Award, and his fiction has been awarded the Lamar York, Gail Crump, Hamlin Garland, and New Millennium Prizes. He is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Siena Heights University, and leads fiction workshops in the United States and Europe.

• millions
  http://www.themillions.com/2016/09/humanitys-dogged-endurance-on-alexander-weinsteins-children-of-the-new-world.html
  Word count: 1339

  Humanity’s Dogged Endurance: On Alexander Weinstein’s ‘Children of the New World’
  By Bayard Godsave posted at 12:00 pm on September 15, 2016 1

  cover

  In his debut story collection, Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein conjures for his readers a glimpse of the future, or a possible one. Weinstein’s stories evoke a time, not too far off, when humanity has moved ever closer to the Singularity, that moment when human consciousness and technology will merge. Having not yet arrived at the utopia of faster-than-light-speed cognition giddily imagined by futurists like Ray Kurzweil, technology for the characters in these stories, typically appearing as some version of the Internet, or virtual reality, or both, often acts as an intrusion upon consciousness — as opposed to a more harmonious fusion with. What tends to get overlooked by utopian dreamers of Kurzweil’s ilk, what Weinstein chooses to examine head-on is that whatever technologies might emerge, and however they might propel our evolution, there will likely be someone with designs on exploiting them for profit. In the story “The Cartographers,” for example, the main character is a programmer who designs memories — happy vacations, a stable childhood, but darker ones too, like drug addictions and multiple deployments — which customers can upload directly into their brains. The company’s downfall comes when they agree to weave product placements into the fabric of those memories; the decision ends up killing their business, but that doesn’t mean the marketing strategy is dead. As one of the other characters says, “People resist thought ads, but soon enough they’ll be as commonplace as napkins.”

  In considering the Singularity, the question is not only to what degree humans will absorb technology, but also to what degree technology will become human — that is, at what point do we accord technological beings the rights of those which we consider to be “like us.” It’s an ethical question, and one that Weinstein grapples with in several places. The opening story, for example, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” concerns a family that has purchased a human simulacrum, a lifelike AI robot, to help them raise their adopted daughter. The robot, Yang, begins to fail and the narrator, who has always let himself believe, crassly, that Yang is merely a piece of helpful technology, begins to recognize, through a devastating and beautiful sequence of scenes, that defining the world from some narrow and arbitrary “human” perspective can often lead to cruelty. The title story, “Children of the New World,” concerns an older couple that conceives and has children in a virtual reality. The initial conception comes early on, as they are still exploring the virtual world. Soon they find themselves enjoying the pleasures of Dark City, a kind of virtual red light district, where their avatars pick up viruses that force them to reboot their virtual existence entirely, wiping away everything, including their children. In both stories we see a society prepared to think of these apparently sentient beings as something less than human, as disposable. Yang is just a robot, the narrator in that story is told, he can be replaced — although the problems of the economy, still with us it seems even all those years in the future, make this fix difficult. When the couple in “Children of the New World” first conceives, they are taken by surprise, and learn that they can “remove an unwanted pregnancy as dragging a file to the recycle bin.” But the characters in these stories are different from those around them. They can’t help feel some affinity towards these nonhumans, where others feel indifference or even revulsion, and that affinity, these stories seem to say, is what really makes them human. With the help of a support group, the couple in “Children of the New World” begins to move towards a kind of realization:

  Bill’s advice has helped us get to a place where we can say what happened wasn’t our fault, that we’re not monsters, that our children didn’t die because of us. We were lonely. We were needful. We wanted to feel pleasure again, to be caressed and loved. Our longings were those of humans, not monsters. The real monsters of this world are the hackers and scammers[.]

  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. The way “The Cartographers” ends (I won’t ruin it here) reminded me structurally of the classic Arthur C. Clarke story, “Star,” in which the reader discovers that the supernova that destroyed a faraway Earth-like planet was in fact the star of Bethlehem. On display is an enviable ability on the part of Weinstein to craft endings. In “Migration,” for example, a narrator leaves the cocoon of his home to go out into the waste of a climate-ravaged Midwest littered with abandoned big box stores to search for his son — the story leads to one of the most transcendent images of a communion with the natural world that I have seen in some time.

  coverSome of my favorite stories from the collection are those that present themselves as written artefacts from the future. Like what David Shields and Matthew Vollmer have called “fraudulent artifacts” in their anthology Fakes, these stories come in the form of dictionary entries or a scholarly paper, which allows Weinstein, as in “A Brief History of the Failed Revolution,” to switch registers and foreground the collection’s ethical and philosophical questions concerning our relationship to technology, what it means to have consciousness, and so on. That isn’t to say that in these spaces the book falls over into abstraction. There is still narrative — the story of an attempt by some to opt out of technological integration — and conflict — the rift this causes amongst scientists and colleagues. What I like about “A Brief History of the Failed Revolution” and “Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary,” is that they feel more immersive than the mostly literary first-person stories throughout the rest of the book and, placed strategically throughout the collection, they go a long way towards constructing the atmosphere of Weinstein’s future world, which is one where consumerism has run amok, where the so-called West (still) makes terrorists out of people who aren’t like them. The collection, I think, could have used more stories like these, but that is probably personal preference, and to most readers more of them might have felt like too much of a good thing.

  At first glance, there seems to be a real pessimism running through much of Children of the New World — it is telling that the collection ends with “Ice Age,” in which what remains of humanity sits atop 20 feet of snow, the one-time denizens of America’s suburbs reduced to hunting and gathering. Weinstein seems to say that while we can make startling advances in Internet porn, we cannot clean up the mess we’ve made of our environment—but that 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. In the end, though many are left broken hearted — the narrator in “The Cartographers,” or Andy in “Openness,” who loses the love of his life because the technology exists now to let another person completely into one’s consciousness, which it turns out may not be such a great thing — they are also left longing, and in that longing there is a sense that they will go on. No matter how terrifying the world becomes, the parents in these stories go on loving their children, and fight to protect them. And maybe that dogged endurance is what it is to be human. Maybe that is what will save us.

• rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2016/11/children-of-the-new-world-by-alexander-weinstein/
  Word count: 747

  Children of the New World by Alexander Weinstein

  Reviewed By Kevin O'Kelly

  November 8th, 2016

  Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein’s debut short story collection, depicts a terrifyingly plausible future only decades away: the planet is devastated, online communication continues to displace physical contact, almost every human experience has been commoditized, and virtual reality and biotechnology have extended the possibilities of love and sex in frequently questionable ways.

  Most if not all of these themes are, of course, clichés of speculative fiction, but Weinstein is such a mesmerizing writer that he infuses old sci-fi tropes with emotional life. The first story in the collection, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” is about a suburban family’s relationship with the android they purchased as a sibling to their adopted Chinese child. Weinstein takes the old question, “Can you love a robot?” and weaves in the moral dilemmas inherent in making a purchase and in valuing some lives more than others, to craft an improbably short, frequently grotesque, ultimately moving story that answers the question with a qualified but firm yes.

  The second story, “The Cartographers,” deals with another sci-fi cliché, implanted memories. But Weinstein handles it masterfully with his excellent writing and rich imagination, constructing a fictional future in which implanting memories is a nascent industry fraught with ethical issues: is giving someone memories of experiences they’ve never had (a vacation to Cuba, a happy childhood) inherently wrong? Even if you think it’s not, does including advertisements in fabricated memories cross a line? Weinstein works this material compellingly when depicting the confused consciousness of a man who learns some of his memories are false: “I scrolled through my phone, my grip sweaty and slippery, until I found a number listed as HOME… Did I have parents? Were they both still alive?” And then the author delivers an emotional sucker punch conveying the anguish that accompanies this character’s discovery that his most cherished memories never happened, but nevertheless they’re still part of him:

  You can never get rid of memories, you can only try to ignore them… I’ve never… swum in the Caribbean, and I’ve never made love with Cynthia. All the same, I keep working on my letters to her. I tell her I can still remember her skin against mine as we slept… and the sound of her voice telling me, over and over, must how much she loved me.

  Alexander Weinstein

  Alexander Weinstein

  The future Alexander Weinstein creates for us is further darkened by the economic instability that plagues so many of his characters: a family’s one chance at a decent future might be getting their babies roles in diaper commercials; desperate suburbanites sell their topsoil to rapacious landscaping companies; promising athletes wreck their bodies in extreme sports television programs and become injured has-beens. Everyone’s a few hours away from the big score, or from finding themselves on the street.

  Many of the stories in this collection end with a character abandoning the deadening world of constant exposure to virtual reality and other media for love and contact with another human being. The shift is quite effective and moving in a story or two, but not after it occurs often enough the reader starts to expect it. This thematic repetition could have been avoided by saving some of these short pieces for a later collection. And at times Weinstein is guilty of imaginative overreach that ruins a scene. Speculative fiction is a difficult, delicate art. Some details can make a fictional world seem fantastical or futuristic but still real. Others can render that world completely ridiculous. “Migration” begins as a satisfyingly bleak short story in a wired society committed to lifeless convenience. I was emotionally engaged with this world and its characters until Weinstein went too far in a scene where a professor has online sex with a student: their avatars are endowed with multiple sexual organs. Lines like, “[she] rips the collar around my shoulders, revealing the erection in the middle of my chest” and “She unties her own trench coat, and…I see the vagina beneath her right breast” aren’t sexy or funny—they’re just ludicrous.

  Weinstein is a fearfully prescient writer, and his stories are compelling depictions of people like ourselves, struggling in a future that’s almost here.

• wired
  https://www.wired.com/2016/09/dont-worry-authors-got-dystopia-figured/
  Word count: 1427

  Brian Raftery Culture Date of Publication: 09.20.16.
  09.20.16
  Time of Publication: 7:00 am.
  7:00 am

  Don’t Worry, This Author’s Got Our Dystopia All Figured Out

  Picador

  About a decade ago, the author Alexander Weinstein suffered an unexpectedly affecting loss: His computer died, taking with it years of his creative work. “I was deeply upset,” says the 39-year-old writer and instructor. “Around the same time, a lot of my students were getting iPhones, and talking about how much they loved them—saying that, if they lost anything, please don’t let it be their iPhones. I got the sense that we were all starting to forge this very deep emotional connection with technology.”
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  Weinstein’s response came in the form of a short story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” which is now the first entry in his future-shocked, surprisingly moving, thoroughly excellent new speculative-fiction collection, Children of the New World. “Yang”—which, like many of the pieces in the book, takes place between 2o to 30 years in the future—follows a young middle-class couple whose aloof robot-son has suddenly gone on the fritz (they know something’s wrong when, one morning over breakfast, Yang repeatedly bangs his head into his Cheerios). Their relationship with the mechanical kid had always been a bit clinical, almost perfunctory: “He came to us fully programmed,” notes the narrator-dad, “[and] there wasn’t a baseball game, pizza slice, bicycle ride, or movie I couldn’t introduce to him.” But when faced with the option of tossing him into the scrap heap, the loss is almost too much to bear; for a robot, Yang had become awfully life-like. Eventually, they bury him in the backyard, but stick his voicebox in the living room, just to hear him talk.

  Children of the New World is full of tales like this—deeply empathetic, sneakily funny, and clearly concerned about the ever-fuzzing line between our minds, our hearts, and our gadgets; it’s a little bit Kafka, and a little bit Kaufman. And even though the future Children imagines is occasionally pushed to the brink of bleakness—Weinstein wrote it over the last decade, a period that saw such disasters as the BP oil spill and the Flint water crisis—the book is hardly a collection of tsk-tsking, glum parables. Instead, it roots for its characters, and its readers, by presenting a dystopia that’s perhaps inevitable, yet also conquerable.

  ChildrenoftheNewWorld1.jpg
  Jessica Spilos

  “These are warning stories that say, ‘Please, let’s not head into this future’—even though, in many ways, we seem to be going there already,” says Weinstein, who lives in Michigan, and who serves as director of the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. “That said, my hope is that they carry the hopefulness of humanity. A lot of my characters are good people trying to discover what it means to be human.”
  The Future of Monkind

  One of the reasons Children of the New World is so unsettling is because the yet-to-be society it envisions feels dangerously close to our own—especially when it comes the book’s made-up technology. Like the all-too-human A.I. in Spike Jonze’s 2013 drama Her, or the subconscious-spelunking devices in Kathryn Bigelow’s 1995 sci-fi thriller Strange Days, the gizmos in Children, and their various applications, feel just a few generations or iterations away from what we already have. In “Fall Line,” a former skiing champ, felled by a brutal injury, recounts the years he spent broadcasting first-person footage of nearly every moment of his day, from the slopes to the bedroom, via a contact-lens camera. “Children of the New World,” meanwhile, deals with parents who immerse themselves in a virtual-reality world where their children exist solely as digital creations—and who must decide whether or not to “delete” the kids after a virus tears through their cyber-constructed world. And “Moshka” follows a likably naive world-traveler who seeks out a synthetic form of enlightenment; he finds it in a run-down back-room joint in Nepal, where he’s seated in an old beauty salon chair, and hooked up to a consciousness-altering device powered by “gutted laptops, stray mice, and a cluster of computer towers interconnected by cables.”

  It’s already an extension of where we’re headed, since the rewards system that Pokémon Go works on tells us that we should always be on: ‘Even if you go for a walk in the woods, make sure you have your phone, because there might be a Pokémon out there.’ That replacement of the natural world with the wireless online, streamlined world is what I’m talking about in these stories. Alexander Weinstein

  That mix of high- and low-tech gives Children an extra layer of plausibility; even when the stories tilt toward absurdity, they feel grounded in some sort of reality, no matter how far-off. But while Weinstein notes that he’s on his iPhone just as frequently as the rest of us, he’s not a hardware-savvy futurist. “I don’t do a lot of research,” he says. “Really, the research comes from my own failings at using technology. I’ll notice the awkward mistakes I’m making on my phone, and that will lead to me thinking, ‘Ah, maybe some kind of implant would make this easier.’ And my friends know that I write these stories, so they send me horrifying news links about new skin-grafts, or putting eye-screens in contact lenses, and those will often give me new ideas.”

  And, for a book about the ease with which we give ourselves over to such technologies, the release of Children is especially well-timed: Earlier this summer, Weinstein watched as millions of people around immersed themselves in the world in Pokémon Go, with some players getting so wrapped up in the game, they wound up falling down ditches or crashing their car into a tree.

  “It was wild,” says Weinstein. “All of a sudden, you had these metaphors for zombiehood, with whole streets full of people wandering around, looking at their phone. It’s already an extension of where we’re headed, since the rewards system that Pokémon works on tells us that we should always be on: ‘Even if you go for a walk in the woods, make sure you have your phone, because there might be a Pokémon out there.’ That replacement of the natural world with the wireless online, streamlined world is what I’m talking about in these stories.”
  A New Hope

  One of the closing entries of Children of the New World is the jarring “Rocket Night,” a four-and-a-half-page, almost giddily dark account of an annual elementary-school event in which students, parents, and teachers place the least-popular kid in a rocket, and then blast him or her into space. The story’s notable not only for its casual, almost comically banal portrayal of group-think gone awry—its length and leeriness make it a clear descendent of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery”—but also because it’s one of the few stories in Children in which people turn against each other, and in which mood and setting shift from dystopic to nearly post-apocyalptic. For the most part, Weinstein’s characters are either trying to redefine, or even reclaim, their humanity, despite having nearly surrendered to technology. The skier in “Fall Line” eventually takes to the mountains again; the grieving couple in “Children of the New World” join a support group for other parents who’ve suffered loss in the virtual world. The men and women of Children may remain beholden to their contraptions, but they’re increasingly dependent on each other, as well.

  “They all want to create community or family connections again,” Weinstein says. “In that way, I don’t think the book is dystopian as much as it is hopeful. Kindness, love, and compassion are still very necessary components in what it means to be human.” And, in a book like this, they’re also reminders that, no matter how crazy or terrifying the future might be, at least we’ll stare it down together.

• locus
  http://www.locusmag.com/Reviews/2016/09/paul-di-filippo-reviews-alexander-weinstein/
  Word count: 907

  Paul Di Filippo reviews Alexander Weinstein

  — posted Sunday 25 September 2016 @ 12:42 pm PDT

  Children of the New World, by Alexander Weinstein (Picador 978-1250098993, $16.00, 240pp, trade paperback) 13 September 2016

  Once some inspired writer conceived of the notion of writing a coherent “future history” in science fictional mode, then the corollary notion of visiting different points of that future history in a series of related but not directly sequential stories was also almost immediately born. And so we have the milestone volume by Heinlein, The Past Through Tomorrow. Since then, scores of such volumes have appeared, with some fairly recent standouts being Baxter’s Vacuum Diagrams and Matthew Derby’s Super Flat Times. I myself attempted such a collection with Ribofunk. And of course, the mode is popular as well among purely mimetic writers, going back at least as far as Winesburg, Ohio.

  With his debut volume, Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein is the latest creator to venture down such a path, and a fine job he does. Coming from outside the genre precincts, he nonetheless exhibits an intimate familiarity and dexterity with all of SF’s toolkit, as well as the ability to insert some subtle homages to past landmarks of SF.

  The stories play nicely off each other to illuminate an era-to-come that is pretty much a straight-line extrapolation of many current trends—most of them unfortunate. This book features no wild-card alien invasions or unforeseen plagues; no gigantic tipping points into a new Ice Age or Burning World (well, at least not till the final story); no world-ruling dictators or transformative geniuses. Instead, we get logical albeit still surprising extensions of artificial intelligence and genetic engineering, of new drugs and new recreational devices, of social media and fads, all slimed over with the anomie and existential dread that has plagued modern civilization for at least a century now.

  Weinstein’s preference for first-person narrators induces a full sensory immersion in his world, but he also experiments formalistically in the manner of John Brunner using “multimedia” inserts in Stand on Zanzibar.

  Our first story, “Saying Goodbye to Yang” harks to Brian Aldiss’s “Super-Toys Last All Summer Long,” as we witness a well-off selfish couple dealing with the “demise” of the robot companion for their human child. The litany of consumerism that afflicts the family and their lack of introspection is suitably damning. But as in the subsequent stories, Weinstein exhibits an ultimate compassion and empathy for his figures which render them pitiable, if not likable.

  “The Cartographers” deals with memory implants, fake lives purchased by jaded “viewers.” “Corner-store memories [that] China’s producing—$8.99 porn thrills so poorly constructed that you can see the patches of light where the software burns through the girls’ skin.” Highly Gibsonian. “Heartland” involves a father commodifying his smart kid on a game show—and stopping short of further, more vile exploitation. “Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary” is one of the more experimental entries, being just what it advertises, a selection of slang definitions that highlight some of the more perverse elements of this era.

  In “Moksha” we journey to Nepal for some electronically induced enlightenment: “old and young alike…getting data shot through their crown chakras for five thousand rupees a pop.” Virtual and augmented realities play a large part in Weinstein’s vision, and in the title story we are faced with the emotional and ethical dilemma of having to delete some very special avatars. I should use this instance to mention that Weinstein focuses on the flyover parts of America, not the big cities, seeing our representative heroes in suburban and rural climes.

  “Fall Line” deals with the plight of a famous winter-sports athlete when all the snow is gone. The acidic spirit of Stanislaw Lem hovers over the droll fake academic report titled “A Brief History of the Failed Revolution.” More family dynamics are explored in “Migration,” which, in its portrayal of individuals afraid to leave the safety of their home, instead existing in a Boschean VR simulation, conjures up thoughts of David Bunch’s Moderan without the manic glee.

  Any story that features Tibetan Buddhist terrorists led by the Dalai Lama, as does “The Pyramid and the Ass,” is worthy of Tom Disch or Norman Spinrad. “It was Rocket Night at our daughter’s elementary school, the night when parents, students, and the administration gather to place the least liked child in a rocket and shoot him into the stars.” So begins “Rocket Night,” in its effective homage to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.” “Openness” tests the feasibility of going off the grid in this Brave New World and trying to remember what unmediated humanity is all about. And finally, “Ice Age” depicts the inutile continuation of hyper-sophisticated behaviors and beliefs in a frozen-over world that is utterly antithetical to our petty concerns.

  The future laid out by Weinstein is both a repudiation of our current way of living and a hopeful assertion that even in a hellish environment some small flowers of redemption can bloom. If you enjoyed George Saunders’s similar CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, you will certainly relish this slightly less surreal, less gonzo instantiation of the all-too-likely sentiment that this civilization and culture of ours is on a greased skid to absolute ethical and corporeal bankruptcy.

• bomb
  http://bombmagazine.org/article/387696/speculative-heroism
  Word count: 1115

  Speculative Heroism
  by David Burr Gerrard

  Alexander Weinstein's debut collection, Children of the New World, presents us with a future absurd enough to be our own.

  Children of the old world respected distinctions between realist fiction and speculative fiction, earnestness and satire, prophecies of apocalypse and unexaggerated descriptions of the present day. In a year that has seen the rise of Donald Trump, Pokémon GO, and seemingly impossible phenomena like luxury cruise liners touring a rather warm Arctic Circle, it's difficult to see how these old aesthetic boundaries can be maintained.

  The jacket copy of Alexander Weinstein's funny, discomfiting, and excellent debut collection Children of the New World says "speculative fiction," but we could really classify its short stories as "realist fiction" and be just as accurate. Better yet, we could regard both of these labels as the distorting goggles they are, and simply take them off.

  Like George Saunders—and younger authors Charles Yu and Alexandra Kleeman—Weinstein uses speculative-fiction premises to explore the inner lives of lonely people trying to do right by people they love, or at least imagine themselves loving. Also like Saunders, Weinstein makes room for small acts of heroism whose nobility slightly but meaningfully outweighs both their absurdity and casual evil. But Weinstein's heroism is even more embattled, ambiguous, and likely to vanish from a story entirely.

  The collection is bookended by two of the most Saunders-esque stories in the collection—which is to say, the stories in which people try hardest to acquit themselves. The first story, "Saying Goodbye to Yang," is set in a near-American future just as rancid with white-nationalist sentiment as the American present. Traditional childbearing methods apparently no longer viable, a white couple has bucked the racist trend to clone ("We clone our own," reads a bumper sticker that sounds horrifyingly plausible) and have instead adopted a Chinese daughter. In a well-meaning, if questionable, attempt to introduce their daughter to Chinese culture, the couple buys a "big brother" robot named Yang who has been made to look "Chinese" and sometimes spits out "fun facts" about China. Of course, there is another reason the couple has bought Yang: to serve as a babysitter. This makes it possible to raise a child, the narrator admits, while his wife "was still putting in forty hours a week at Crate & Barrel, and I was still managing double shifts at Whole Foods." He appears to realize the dubiousness of all of this, but develops real feelings for Yang before it begins to malfunction. He attempts everything within his limited budget to save his robot son and, later, provide a proper burial. It may constitute a bumbling, backwards heroism, but by the end of the story it feels nonetheless real.

  The signature line of the title story, and probably of the whole collection, is "Don't let anyone tell you they weren't real." Spoken by the leader of a support group for those who have lost computer-programed "loved ones" to electronic spam overload, the line could be easy satire, or a heavy-handed attempt to force us into putting full emotional faith in the relationship between characters and their digital offspring. What makes this collection so devastating is that the line reads, somehow, as both satirical and earnest—a doubling that sidesteps the pitfalls of both approaches. We lose track neither of the absurdity of deleting one's children after finding a house full of "cartoon characters hawking downloadable games and attractive women selling vibrators and wrinkle cream," nor of the wrenching horror of that deletion. The collection both questions and honors a world in which we form emotional bonds to characters who exist for us mostly, or entirely, through various technological projections. Weinstein manages to have his simulated cake and eat it too.

  Though an essential humanity always shines through, these stories get darker as the collection progresses. It's not always clear whether these stories all unfold in precisely the same universe, and the chronology appears to jump around slightly, but there is a general forward-moving historical thrust, and the further we get into this future, the greater the destruction from geopolitical and environmental catastrophes. Advancing technology becomes less and less able to disguise its anesthetic function, and attempts at heroism lead to even graver moral degradation. In "Heartland," a father who stood up to his boss for mocking his child has been plunged—partly by his bravery, partly by his alcoholism, partly by the quickly disappearing topsoil—into a financial desperation that makes him seem likely to commit an act of unspeakable evil against his own children. In "Fall Line," a famous extreme skier sidelined due to a major injury has washed out as an instructor-cum-bartender at a ski resort, only to find the job itself disappearing along with the phenomenon of snow, leaving him with only the tawdriest and most dangerous of POV video to play with. The quick and nasty "Rocket Night," an insightful variation on Shirley Jackson's classic short story "The Lottery," imagines a ritual in which an elementary school's least popular student is shot into outer space.

  Heroism arises again only in the final story, "Ice Age," after global warming has destroyed technology and civilization, leaving only an arctic landscape and those few who can survive. Depressingly, but almost certainly correctly, Weinstein imagines that American capitalism will survive American soil, with one family using more than its fair share of scarce firewood and employing workers to build a wall of ice. The narrator's response to a gang that has decided to launch an attack on this family is the closest thing to genuine human decency we see in this collection.

  Describing the collection this way may make it sound as though Weinstein is making an implicit case that civilization needs to be destroyed before we can be human again. His vision is much more complex than that, encompassing new and varied ways of being human, a fact that makes this book's overriding pessimism all the sadder. It makes it all the more difficult to shake this collection after turning the last page. Even with a cursory reading of current events, it's difficult to deny that Weinstein's new world is the one our children will grow up in, if not the one we are already living in. Don't let anyone tell you these stories aren't real.

  David Burr Gerrard is the author of the novels Short Century (Rare Bird, 2014) and The Epiphany Machine (forthcoming from Putnam in 2017). He teaches creative writing at Manhattanville College, the Sackett Street Writers' Workshop, and the 92nd St. Y.

• tethered by letters
  https://tetheredbyletters.com/book-review-children-of-the-new-world-by-alexander-weinstein/
  Word count: 625

  Book Review: Children of the New World—Alexander Weinstein
  by Erini Katopodis

  If you’re looking for a book of short stories with guts, know that Alexander Weinstein’s collection, Children of the New World, contains guts of all possible futures. In these thirteen short stories, we encounter people dealing with the tech of new worlds, exploring how it affects their humanity—or doesn’t.

  Weinstein has a straightforward yet poetic style that places readers right beside his characters. Though the author’s voice can seem homogenous from story to story, this consistency actually benefits the reader; it’s almost as if a character is reincarnated over and over, living out all these possible futures. But where Weinstein really succeeds is his range: he attacks all aspects of future, leaving none untouched.

  In “Moksha,“ his main character searches for enlightenment through a series of expensive electroshock services in Nepal. “Heartland” follows a father who deals suburban melancholy in a dystopian world. “Children of the New World” ponders family loss (real or digital). “Ice Age” explores the world as a frozen tundra, examining how communities change within it. Spiritual, environmental, emotional, political, and—of course—technological: all aspects of life are covered in each possible future, and that’s what makes the book feel whole, despite its fragmentary nature.

  Though Weinstein’s ideas are no doubt entertaining, they are hardly new. It’s easy to see where he garners his inspiration. For example, many of the short stories mimic Black Mirror, the popular futuristic TV show that uses technology to show society its darker half. The high-tech contact lenses that appear in several stories of Weinstein’s, for instance, appear in very similar ways on the show—namely in episodes “The Entire History of You” and “White Christmas.” He borrows from other authors, too: “Rocket Night” feels like a translation of Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” and it’s clear that Weinstein is a George Saunders fan; we find echoes of Saunders’ satirical prose throughout the book. (Some bizarre, half-funny, half-terrifying lines echo Saunders stories, like “I Can Speak!”) In general, Weinstein’s funny yet prosaic style often criticizes commercialization and modern technology, ultimately leaving him no choice but to fall in line with authors like Saunders and Jackson—plus, shows like Black Mirror.

  The meat of his stories is where Weinstein really differs from these influences. Almost every chapter has a similar arc: first, the bizarre technology or environmental situation is introduced, and the reader has a chance to sink their teeth into it. Then, as the story progresses, we reach a peak where one of the characters goes mad; the technology that helped them hinders them, consumes them. But it’s the end of his stories where Weinstein shines as a unique author and conveyor of science fiction. The technology fails the characters; but instead of the cynicism that follows an episode of Black Mirror, in these stories, there is hope. Weinstein invites a sense of renewal, a “back to the beginning” theme, where the characters are stripped of their futuristic “armor” and feel truly naked. Bodies embrace for the first time in years since being in virtual reality; a family comes together in mourning when their android son dies; a community becomes a community again, finding shelter in a house frozen under their harsh new world.

  At the end of each story, the world falls away. It’s not about the terrifying future, it’s about humans doing what they do best: longing for something better, physically, spiritually, emotionally. When the last microchip burns out and the last wire fries, Weinstein reveals human spirit in its purest form.

• open letters monthly
  http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/irritated-by-the-noise-of-kathmandu/
  Word count: 2174

  Irritated by the Noise of Kathmandu
  By Dalton Gentry (September 1, 2016) One Comment

  ChildrenChildren of the New World
  by Alexander Weinstein
  Picador, 2016

  In his debut work of fiction, Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein takes a bold and ambitious approach to answer the question of what will become of our technology-enveloped society as we digress further away from our humanity and embrace the ever-changing virtual reality of the future. The author captivates his readers with haunting and ardent stories that feel both completely foreign and terrifyingly relatable. His writing is clean and precise, jaunting the reader forward into an imagined dystopia which becomes more plausible every day. Through a series of unreliable narrators grappling with the challenge of existence while being torn between the traditions of a bygone era and the luxury and convenience of a virtual new world, Weinstein entertains his audience, but fails to completely captivate in a collection of thirteen short stories,

  In his collection, readers are plunged into a millennial Bohemia where families are created in laboratories and self-actualization is only the press of a button away. “The Cartographers” explains the public trade of virtually created memories and the addictive consequence of forgoing reality while “Fall Line” balances the pendulum as protagonist Ronnie Hawks forges a mundane life free from streaming his reality to a live audience. Thematically each story suggests the appeal of a minimalist lifestyle void of technological advance, as expanded technology seems to only create expanded problems. Often a chilling and harrowing prophecy, each story offers the reader a glance into the dystopian future imagined by Weinstein.

  In the first story in the collection, “Saying Goodbye to Yang,” we are allowed to peek into the lives of the nuclear family of the new world where children can be purchased in the form of life-like, self-sufficient androids. “Saying Goodbye to Yang” generously comments on the inevitable lack of diversity a global society of the future will offer. Older siblings are often purchased for younger siblings to teach them rigid, programmed lessons about their heritage. For his daughter Mika, the father of the story purchases Yang, a Chinese android, who acts as both a big brother and a learning module. As Yang ages, his internal system fails and is beyond repair, creating a paradox where a replaceable appliance has become a beloved family member. As any parents would however, the family has grown closely attached to their robotic son and find it difficult to move on once their child becomes obsolete. Mika’s parents are left with no choice but to bury their broken appliance like they would their own child after a technician coldly labels him inoperable:

  The funeral goes well. It’s a beautiful October day, the sky thin and blue, and the sun lights up the trees, bringing the ocher and amber of the season. I imagine what the three of us must look like to the neighbors. A bunch of kooks, burying their electronic equipment like pagans. I don’t care. When I think about Yang being ripped apart in a recycling plant, or stuffing him into our plastic garbage can and setting him out with the trash, I know this is the right decision. Standing together as a family, in the corner of our backyard, I say a couple of parting words. I thank Yang for all the joy he brought to our lives. Then Mika and Kyra say goodbye. Mika begins to cry, and Kyra and I bend down and put our arms around her, and we stay there, holding one another in the early morning sunlight.

  Family and the human experience continue to be an ongoing theme throughout the collection, where families of the new world are faced with a set of hypothetical complications of the future. “Rocket Night” is a whimsical attempt at dark humor in which the least-liked child each year from a local elementary school is blasted off into space against the will of the child and parents. The parents of the community gather in an annual block party which harks back to a tradition of families of the past and ceremoniously presents the illusion of support for the family of the forsaken child. Weinstein takes the liberty of pressing the matter of poverty when describing the experience of preparing the child to be launched into space.

  The boy to be sent off, I believe his name was Daniel, stood near his parents, holding his mother’s skirt, looking unkempt. One could immediately see the reason he’d been chosen. The mildewed scent of thrift store clung to his corduroys, and his collar sat askew, revealing the small white undershirt beneath. His brown slacks were held up by an oversize belt, the end of which flopped lazily from the side. The boy, our daughter told us, brought stubby pencils to school whose chewed-up ends got stuck in the sharpeners.

  The notion of the impoverished being selected for the ritualized sacrifice of the rich is amusing, but nonetheless fails to save the story from a rushed and heavy-handed conclusion which leads us to ponder the logic behind the parent’s actions. The tragic but hilarious ending image of a cosmic belt of children drifting through the void of space, with only a microphone to speak themselves about their journey, forces an immediately regretful laugh. Ridiculous and slap-stick in nature, the situation instantaneously shifts as the loneliness and abandonment sink in and force readers to reevaluate their opinion:

  I imagined them drifting alone up there, speaking into their microphones, reporting to themselves about the depths of the unknown.

  weinstein“Moksha” grapples with the eastern philosophy of enlightenment when our Children of the New World can purchase an illegal, mind-altering electronic shock that transports them from the ruins of the civilized world to Nirvana. Even then however, when gifted the peace and serenity of existence, the latest generation is unsatisfied and hungers for more, becoming addicted to the pleasures of simplicity and harmony. For a brief moment the user of Moksha achieves their moment of clarity unlocked by a series of electronic sounds and lights they are left in a euphoric state of acceptance. It is only when the users are left alone with the realities of the world that they have created that they desire to escape once more. Enlightenment as a controlled substance is not a foreign concept for readers. Weinstein attempts to channel Huxley’s Brave New World while developing the premise for this story. Even as the effects of the expensive Moksha procedure begin to wane, the user realizes that true enlightenment and self-actualization are within the human soul. As with any mind-altering drug, the effects soon drop the user back into the harsh reality which they had attempted to escape from the beginning:

  Enlightenment, it turned out, didn’t last long. By the next morning, Abe could already feel the hooks of samsara tethering him to the bed. He worried about his return to the States and his menial job brewing lattes at the co-op. He found himself irritated by the noise of Kathmandu, the dust, his dirty clothes, which stank of sweat, and the humidity that already drenched his body. And so he dressed, and returned to the small shop to pay his twenty-three thousand rupees. He tasted Moksha again, only to come crashing down later that evening, realizing with deep terror that, at this rate, he wouldn’t have enough money to last him till the end of the month.

  The most enjoyable story, however, which lends its title to the entirety of the collection, “Children of the New World,” sets the tone for the entirety of the collection. A family that has been forged within the realms of a virtual reality paradise is forced to give up their existence, wipe and reboot their virtual world after a night of self-indulgent pleasure and passion. Upon catching a virus in their virtual reality, the only option they have is to delete their existence. The couple’s children will be deleted, along with their home, virtual property and everything they had spent their physical life creating. After becoming so immersed in the virtual world, the couple is faced with the reality that they have sacrificed their physical existence for an imaginative world that is lost with the press of a button. For them however, their virtual paradise was real. They grieve for the loss of their computer generated children and are forced to look within themselves as human beings to cope with the ramifications of their actions. The pairing of true, psychological grief and a non-existent virtual world is sobering for the reader, forcing them to accept the computerized investments of the couple, however ridiculous they may seem, as their real life compared to the physical existence of others.

  Drawing away from the passion and sorrow, the writing techniques in the story, “Excerpts from the New World Authorized Dictionary” offer a disassociated technical reading experience. Instead of the format and layout of the previously introduced stories in the collection, Weinstein attempts to imply authority while defining his world with a series of dictionary excerpts of strange and unusual terms meant to entice and intrigue the reader. Being immediately plunged into a rigid format of story, rather than a traditional approach, is overwhelmingly disorienting. Instead of presenting additional stories, it reads as though the author is simply creating terminology to support himself, supplementing the collection rather than expanding it.

  wink, winking, Wink v. [from Winker:social-networking Brain/Web interface site created in 2027 by MIT student Jeremiah Jones, originally called Socialwinker] To include or exclude people in your field of vision or hearing by use of Winker’s Blue-Eye® technology.

  Clunky and irrelevant, this small portion of the collection will immediately divert the attention of the reader away from the heartfelt, painful scenarios in the rest of the collection and force them to not identify with the world they’ve been placed in, but rebel against it. The rigid, technical dictionary terms may be fantastic and imaginative, but the presentation is not as engaging and entertaining as the rest of the collection, feeling more supplementary than immersive.

  Weinstein sends us forward with a different type of tale. “Ice Age” changes the pace of the collection, focusing on a community of survivors stuck in a barren, uninhabitable frozen wasteland that is all but void of technology and convenience. Banded as one and surviving throughout their suffering, the colony joins together to fight against the one member of the community who exploits his wealth and his collection of ancient technological artifacts. As is consistent in Weinstein’s collection, however, the society again will succumb to the allure of an easier existence tainted by the cold, inhumane hands of technology. The protagonist of “Ice Age” however, attempts to make the best of his situation by adopting a minimalist dogma that defies the societal norms in which he has rapidly been thrust into:

  I don’t say anything, just stand there, taking it all in: the smell of alcohol, the men emptying the shelves of knick-knacks, the windows white with snow. It’s obvious what’s about to happen; so clear that, even before Phil offers me a drink, I know what I’m going to do. I’m going to ask Phil where the kids’ toys are, and when he tells me, I’m going to get to them before anyone else does.

  Weinstein struggles to prove his argument that although the “Children of the New World” have created the flawed society which their control hungry egos drive them farther away from basic human interaction, it is their children who bring them back and ground them once more into the reality which we know all too well. Through the eyes of their own children, the families we meet during this journey are able to realize that beyond the world of self indulgent fantasy and virtual paradise, the love and affection they so desperately seek has been within their reach the entire time.

  Painful, dark and occasionally brilliant, Children of the New World falls ever so slightly short of persuading the reader to abandon their precious technology for a much simpler existence. A concoction of beautiful writing, heart-wrenching storytelling and real life futuristic scenarios allow the majority of these stories ample ground to stand alone as a enjoyable read, but when compiled into a collection, they begin to feel repetitive for the reader. This collection for a new generation allows Weinstein to tap into the ideals of the new millennials and plead with them to realize the error of their technological revolution before they find themselves lost in their own creation. A powerful, gut-punching and brilliant work of fiction, Children of the New World defines the future of the household.

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