Love Minus Eighty
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- €3.99
Publisher Description
A NOVEL OF LOVE AND DEATH, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
The words were gentle strokes, drawing her awake.
"Hello. Hello there."
She felt the light on her eyelids, and knew that if she opened her eyes they would sting, and she would have to shade them with her palm and let the light bleed through a crack.
"Feel like talking?" A man's soft voice.
And then her mind cleared enough to wonder: who was this man at her bedside?
She tried to sigh, but no breath came. Her eyes flew open in alarm.
The Minus Eighty . . .
Where millionaires browse the catalogue of icy women, judging on beauty ratings and revival costs.
Where a freezer's gentle hum plays the background symphony for the world's most expensive first dates.
Where death is only the beginning.
Love Minus Eighty is a disquieting vision of our romantic future, as hopeful as it is horrifying, by a Hugo Award-winning author.
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.
