Bomb – Children of the old world respected distinctions between realist fiction and speculative fiction, earnestness and satire, prophecies of apocalypse and unexaggerated descriptions of the present day. In a year that has seen the rise of Donald Trump, Pokémon GO, and seemingly impossible phenomena like luxury cruise liners touring a rather warm Arctic Circle, it’s difficult to see how these old aesthetic boundaries can be maintained.
The jacket copy of Alexander Weinstein’s funny, discomfiting, and excellent debut collection Children of the New World says “speculative fiction,” but we could really classify its short stories as “realist fiction” and be just as accurate. Better yet, we could regard both of these labels as the distorting goggles they are, and simply take them off.