View to a thrill

In 1974, philosopher Robert Nozick proposed a thought experiment that launched a thousand stoner bull sessions.

“Suppose there was an experience machine that would give you any experience you desired,” he wrote in Anarchy, State, and Utopia, his libertarian manifesto. “Superduper neuropsychologists could stimulate your brain so that you would think and feel you were writing a great novel, or making a friend, or reading an interesting book.” In real life, you’d be doing nothing of the sort, he stressed. You’d be floating in a tank. “Should you plug into this machine for life,” he asked, “pre-programming your life’s experiences?”

This question reveals a terrible anxiety — that technology may rob us of authentic experience, that it may annihilate our very sense of self — and is central to Children of the New World, Alexander Weinstein’s seductive debut collection of short stories.

This is not an impeccable book. Going through it is a bit like going through a car wash, with alternating spells of monotony and liveliness; some parts are messier than others. But the best of Weinstein’s stories whistle with a cockeyed, formidable intelligence, and he is not afraid to provoke.

“Did I ever fight in Afghanistan?” asks a young man in The Cartographers, one of the most memorable stories of the lot. He specializes in the manufacture of bespoke memories. Like so many pedlars of mind-altering substances, he spends far too much time sampling his own stuff.

Weinstein’s stories contain moments of moral complexity and, even more challenging — and more moving — moments of grace

“You weren’t born yet,” says Cynthia, his female companion.

Really? So wait: Did he go to Bermuda recently? Nope. She’s sure? Yup. “You’ve got to stop beaming,” she admonishes — memories, she means, into his own head. “You’re getting addicted.”

And so it goes in Weinstein’s not-so-distant future, in which the earth may be frozen solid or dry as dead skin. Most of the characters in his 13 stories have vanished into the grid. Its siren call is just too hard to resist.

Enlightenment seekers flee to the hills of Nepal, where they can get “data shot through their crown chakras for five thousand rupees a pop.” Couples slip into virtual worlds to have extraordinary, if mildly depressing, sex. (One image for you: “Thousand-finger parlors.”) Retinal sensors provide “Innervision” to watch TV and eyemail to receive communiqués; lovers get to know each other by revealing successive “layers,” a mute form of file-sharing, with reels of childhood memories swapped, yearnings exchanged, and future plans unveiled.

This becomes a problem for a fellow whose girlfriend has a house in the Maine woods. There’s no reception up there, which means his layers don’t work. He’s not really accustomed to talking.

The themes Weinstein explores are hardly new. The darker potential of technology is a staple of William Gibson’s and Bruce Sterling’s cyberpunk. The British TV series Black Mirror often paints a terrifically spooky and deranged vision of technological excess. Sherry Turkle, an early Internet evangelist from MIT — she was on the cover of Wired magazine in 1996 — now argues that the virtual world drives us apart, rather than unites us, and shallows our capacity for reflection. The title of her 2011 book, Alone Together, says it all.

At his least artful moments, Weinstein’s stories are too literal, and his moral take-aways too obvious. The most vivid example of this tendency appears in Excerpts from The New World Authorized Dictionary, which is exactly what it sounds like — a self-conscious series of unrealized story ideas. One of his entries is “togging”: “The practice of relying upon ITPs (Inner-Ear Therapy Programs) while in a public space, often in the company of others or during social interaction (eating, walking, while in conversation).” Yikes. Swipe left.

But at their finest, Weinstein’s stories contain moments of moral complexity and, even more challenging — and more moving — moments of grace. The calamity-howler’s view is that the virtual world offers a hollow substitute for lived experience. But what if technology offers us psychological comforts that the real world has denied us? What if it fulfils some of our deepest yearnings that have nothing to do with, say, sex?

In the title story of this collection, Children of the New World, a childless couple — the wife is post-menopause — must enter the mists of cyberspace to start a family. Judge them if you like: They waited too long, perhaps, and in their on-the-grid lives, they still indulge their carnal needs, going to those thousand-finger parlours while their virtual children sleep.

Yet when these parents are told to delete their online children — their account has been corrupted by a virus — it’s crushing to read about. “If it’s any consolation,” a supervisor tells the father, “they won’t feel a thing; they’re just data.” But the parents feel plenty, the mother especially. “She felt their bodies disappear from beneath her embrace.”

The reader feels the same melancholy in Saying Goodbye to Yang, which opens the collection and is by far its strongest story. Yang is a robotic older brother purchased specifically to care for an adopted little girl from China. One day, without warning, he goes on the fritz, slamming face-first into a bowl of cereal. The image of him crumpled into the trunk of the narrator’s car amid jumper cables and windshield-washing fluid is upsetting; so too is the moment when the mechanic tells the narrator that the most he can do is salvage Yang’s language system.

“If you want, I can separate the head for you,” he says.

“Are you kidding?” the narrator replies. “I’m not giving my daughter her brother’s head to play with.”

OK, this moment is not just touching but also funny. This is Weinstein at his best: Exposing hidden corners of ourselves, or perhaps how generous our capacity for empathy is. And maybe it’s not such a surprise. We often invest in fictional characters as if they were members of our own families. That these particular characters are made of bioplastic, data or pixels may be just as immaterial — in every sense.