Short stories, on a love-related topic and dystopian settings may sound as a very entertaining reading possibility. I am very reluctant about anything Sci-Fi and dystopic adventures, unless it is highly executed and this was what I was expecting from this collection. Which was not honestly the case...
Universal Love by Alexander Weistein was published in 2020 and I´ve read it in 2024. In the last four years there have been many evolutions in the field of social media and virtual reality - Artificial Intelligence-everything being one of them. However, many of the stories, populated with humans sometimes interacting with half- or fully robots or robotic characters, do look like placed in a vintage Second Life, experiencing avatar sex and getting caught in virtual war games, going through the same drama of real time war. There are also some characters programmed to behave in a specific way through a chip or a chip card.
Although the longing for human relations and physical contact in real life is a human, emotional experience, I personally expected a higher sophistication of the narratives. The stories are missing that vital impulse that may attract even someone not usually consuming such genre. My challenge of reading something out of my comfort zone failed this time.
Rating: 2.5 stars
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