Universal Love: Stories - Alexander Weinstein
Universal Love: Stories contains a collection of short stories which imagine a “near-future world where our everyday technologies have fundamentally altered the possibilities and limits of how we love one another.” I was hugely intrigued by this blurb and pre-ordered the collection from my local independent book store months in advance. The collection, Weinstein’s second, contains eleven stories; each exploring a future world in which some element of society has been revolutionised by technological advancement.
“The Year of Nostalgia” peers into the near-future to consider how holograms could replace loved ones we’ve lost, in order to ease our grief. Memories are uploaded from scanned documents and photos, to create a virtual version of a person who we can continue to talk to about our shared experiences. You can imagine the types of moral questions this might throw up - especially when we find evidence of our loved one’s pasts that we may not have been aware of.
“Comfort Porn” explores how society might develop should we lean into relying on technology for company, rather than each another. This story, in particular, raises some interesting questions about social media, anxiety, dating, and the online personas we create to represent ourselves.
“Purple Heart” interestingly details how warfare could eventually be revolutionised to happen virtually through gaming. Players rise the ranks in online war games until they reach a level at which they can be recruited into the virtual armed forces in which they control droids which are engaged in real-world international warfare. If you’re not doing the killing, but simply controlling a virtual killing machine, are you a killer?
There were certainly some fascinating concepts explored within Universal Love. Was I entirely drawn into each of them? Not really. Was I prompted to think about the impact of technology on the way we live, and how that might change in the future? Absolutely. I put this down to the fact that short stories by nature aren’t as all-consuming as the novel form.
It likely takes a great imagination to envisage situations such as these, detailing our near-future, as opposed to those in an unrecognisable future. Weinstein certainly grounds these very human stories in reality and, as such, they feel only just out of reach and are all the more poignant for it.
⭐️⭐️⭐️/5
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