Children of the New World

The “stunning, harrowing, and brilliantly imagined” story collection featuring “After Yang,” the basis for the A24 film starring Colin Farrell (Emily St. John Mandel, author of Station Eleven).

A New York Times Notable Book

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. In “After Yang,” the robotic brother of an adopted Chinese child malfunctions, and only in his absence does the family realize how he had become a real son. 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.