Love Minus Eighty
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
In the future, love is complicated and death is not necessarily the end. Love Minus Eighty follows several interconnected people in a disquieting vision of romantic life in the century to come.
There's Rob, who accidentally kills a jogger, then sacrifices all to visit her in a cryogenic dating facility, seeking forgiveness but instead falling in love.
Veronika, a shy dating coach, finds herself coaching the very woman who is stealing the man she loves.
And Mira, a gay woman accidentally placed in a heterosexual dating center near its inception, desperately seeks a way to reunite with her frozen partner as the years pass.
In this daring and big-hearted novel based on the Hugo-winning short story, the lovelorn navigate a world in which technology has reached the outer limits of morality and romance.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Building his Hugo-winning short story "Bridesicle" into a novel, McIntosh (Hitchers) takes a cold-eyed look at relationships in a grim future. Navigating around Manhattan's floating upper-class enclave, High Town, his characters struggle with age-old questions of finding the perfect mate, complicated by new technology that records every action and that will soon record every feeling. At the center of the story lie the "bridesicles," women of above-average looks and below-average health insurance, preserved from death for the possibility of indentured marriage to wealthy suitors. Mira Bach, the oldest, and Winter West, the newest, experience brief escapes from suspension in "the minus eighty" whenever someone is interested. Around them, protests spark and the guilt-ridden man who killed Winter recruits others to the cause of freeing the frozen. McIntosh layers on the irony, with dating coaches who struggle to find love and an empathy researcher who has a difficult time expressing emotion. It's not clear why insurance covers freezing for centuries but not restoration, and the plot relies heavily on coincidence, but fans of "what if?" SF will enjoy this dystopian tale.
