By Kerryn Goldsworthy
Children of the New World
ALEXANDER WEINSTEIN
TEXT, $22.99
These 13 stories are speculative fictions about the future of humanity in the digital age. Like cyborg theory, they explore the blurred boundaries between the human and the post-human: there are dying robots, virtual children, manufactured memories, and electronic sex from which all traces of the human erotic impulse have vanished. This is also a world in which climate change has had its way with many things. Each of these stories has its genesis in the question "What if …?" and Weinstein's imaginings are far too much like the current state of the world to be anything but chilling. Yet he can also, if only in passing, be very funny. At the other end of the emotional scale, the premise and the pure desolation of Rocket Night is reminiscent of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, one of the great short stories of the 20th century.