Alexander Weinstein

Efter Yang: Fortællinger byder velkommen til en verden i en nær fremtid med farligt medrivende virtual-reality-spil, sociale-medie-implantater, hukommelsesprodukter og kærlige, men også uhyggeligt intuitive AI-robotter! Fra alle steder kan man logge sig på til Den Nye Verden, besøge skinnende huse med hvide vægge, se sit liv lyse op på stimulerende måder. Man kan blive uafhængig af hormonale svingninger, besøge kyssekamre – og få fjernet uønskede graviditeter lige så nemt som at trække en fil hen i papirkurven. Man risikerer at få drænet sin konto eller stjålet sin identitet. Men her er også VR-raves, kroppe befriet fra gamle vaner. Nogle tjener penge på at designe minder. Andre, især unge, drømmer om at være offline." Efter Yang" og bogens andre fortællinger giver et både mørkt og humoristisk indblik i, hvor langt folk er villige til at gå i deres afhængighed af de devices, der allerede er godt i gang med at erstatte den menneskelige erfaring. Om forfatterenAlexander Weinstein er en af de mest anerkendte forfattere inden for SPEKULATIV FIKTION. Genren breder sig i disse år som en ny bølge fra amerikansk litteratur.

Universal Love welcomes readers to a near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another. In these gripping stories, a young boy tries to understand what keeps his father tethered to the drowned city they call home. A daughter gets to know her dead mother's hologram better than she ever knew her living mother. And, at a time when unpleasant memories can be erased, a man undergoes electronic surgery to have his depression, and his past, forever removed. In an age when technology offers the easiest cures for loneliness, these characters must wrestle with what it means to stay human in an increasingly cybernetic future, and how love can endure even the most alluring upgrades. In the vein of Weinstein’s critically-acclaimed first collection, Universal Love is a visionary book, written with one foot in the real world and one stepping bravely into the future.

This seventh issue of TulipTree Review features the winners of the Genre fiction story contest, including Grand Prize winner Alexander Weinstein and HMs/contributors P. Jo Anne Burgh, Sandy Lender, David Brendan Hopes, Evan Hundhausen, Shana Scott, Charles W. Warren, and William Hemlepp.

'Children of the New World', imagines a near future of social-media implants and instant connection, environmental collapse and post-revolution discord. It grapples with our unease in the 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 for all of us who are fascinted by and terrfied of what we might find on the horizon.

Children of the New World introduces readers to a near future world of social media implants, memory manufacturers, dangerously immersive virtual reality games, and alarmingly 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, which they must work to rebuild as we once did millennia ago. In "The Cartographers," the main character works for a company that creates and sells virtual memories, while struggling to maintain a real-world relationship sabotaged by an addiction to his own creations. ln "Saying Goodbye to Yang," the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realise how real a son he has become. 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.