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    Love Minus Eighty
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    Love Minus Eighty
    Unavailable
    Love Minus Eighty
    Audiobook11 hours

    Love Minus Eighty

    Written by Will McIntosh

    Narrated by Ali Ahn, Kevin T. Collins and Eileen Stevens

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHachette Audio
    Release dateJun 11, 2013
    ISBN9781619696723
    Unavailable
    Love Minus Eighty
    Author

    Will McIntosh

    Will McIntosh's debut novel, Soft Apocalypse, was a finalist for both a Locus Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. He is a frequent contributor to Asimov's, where his story 'Bridesicle' won the 2010 Readers' Award, as well as the 2010 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. His third novel, Love Minus Eighty (based on 'Bridesicle'), was named best Science Fiction novel of the year by the American Library Association and was optioned for film by Film4. His other novels include Defenders, optioned by Warner Brothers for a feature film, and the YA novel Burning Midnight. Will was a psychology professor for two decades before turning to writing full-time. He lives in Williamsburg with his family.

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    Reviews for Love Minus Eighty

    4/5

    119 ratings15 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Brilliant world building. Strong characters. Weak plot. Overall very worth reading but lets you down in the end.
    • 3/5
      The only thing I didn't like we're references to things that weren't explained. For the most part it was an interesting take on a future society.
    • 4/5
      The first time Rob meets Winter, he kills her.

      The second time he meets her, he apologises.

      The third time he meets her he begins to fall in love.

      Having just been very publically dumped by his girlfriends over this future worlds social media platform, he s driving home when he hits Winter in his car. She is killed instantly, but by using the latest in cryogenic technologies, her body is repaired and held at 80 degrees below. She has become a bridesicle, a woman who is stored in a cryogenic freezer and is only allowed to waken for five minute speed dates by very rich men who have the power and the money to bring them back to life. As Rob starts to learn more about her, he is spending vast sums of cash in those five minute sessions with her. With the support of his friends, he learns that there are women there that have been held for years until the company decides that they are of no benefit as they are not providing an income. Rob’s friends, Nathan, Veronika and Lycan start to support him in his desire to have Winter revived, and to free these women held at eighty below.

      Found this book to be well worth reading. It had a very original concept, and the futuristic society that he has created is utterly plausible. It has a solid plot too, not so much in the way of twists and turns, but with real depth and a chilling premise of how a corporation can hold fragile humans in its grasp. Great stuff.
    • 5/5
      Great world building, interesting and horrifying premise, ended up being more positive/hopeful than most of the dystopians I read but still made me think about some heavy issues (life vs fear of death, personal relationships, personal authenticity), especially as the end is a bit open and you must consider the "what comes next" for everyone involved.
    • 3/5
      Great worldbuilding! The plot was a little over the place sometimes.
    • 1/5
      Oh hell no. That intro was enough to creep me right out.
    • 3/5
      This book reminds me of that old song "have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn't have fallen in love with?" An awful lot of heartache, jealousy, misery and longing in this kind of love--what? Hexagon? It's complicated, but interesting. Set in an interesting sorta-dystopic 22nd century NYC, I ended up loving/hating the way tech-fueled dating was the main focus of everyones lives...that and living in front of an audience (not dissimilar to our current Facebook, etc. fueled fakeness of today). Weird but pretty decent read, though it ended a little differently than I would have expected.
    • 5/5
      This book was really something special. It doesn't often happen that sci fi romances have the perfect blend of science fiction and romance. More often than not the scale skews one way or the other. Love Minus Eighty had a perfect balance. Loved the characters, loved the progression. Wish they would have focused a bit more on Mira and Jeanette, but they got their happy ending in the end, so that's good.

      All in all, this was an excellent read. Loved it.
    • 3/5
      Love Minus Eighty has an interesting premise: in a future world where cryogenics has been perfected, women who do not have enough insurance to afford freezing and resurrection are frozen by a company that then sells them to rich men who want wives. The women's heads are revived at 5-minute intervals so that they can have "dates" with men who are interested in reviving them. If a man chooses to revive a woman, he pays an exorbitant price, and then she is contractually obligated to marry him and be faithful to him.The story follows several characters who are in inter-related relationships. Rob is driving fast after being horrifically and publicly dumped by his girlfriend, and he hits and kills Winter. When he discovers that Winter is being held in "the bridesicle place," he decides to go meet her to assuage his guilt. The cost of a 5-minute meeting with her is outrageous, so he works long hours at a terrible job to afford it. He also meets Winter's ex-boyfriend, Rob, and his friend Veronica, who has a huge crush on Rob but is also involved in a strange relationship with Lycan, a man she tried to stop from committing suicide who was revived after his suicide.The story definitely has a interesting premise, and the characters are engaging, but the flaws in McIntosh's future world make this book hard to swallow. The bridesicle system is basically a system where the rich can buy the poor, where people can own other people, and where rape is institutionalized. However, the rest of society seems to pretty much follow 21st-century morality (aside from the fact that suicide is legal). The incongruity there made the whole plot seem very contrived. For a society with bridesicles to be believable, there should be other forms of institutionalized slavery and rape, or other ways in which rich ownership of the poor is acceptable. I suppose the fact that they have built another city on top of Manhattan, so that the rich live in the sunlight on top and the poor live in shadow in the old city below, is an indication of a stratified society, but it isn't substantially different than contemporary rich/poor interaction.I was also very bothered by how unrealistic and unexplained the future technology of the book is. The biggest example of this is "screens" - apparently through their wearable electronics, people have ways of "opening screens" in other locations. These screens apparently have physical presence, and that physical presence is limited by physical rules (when something exciting is happening, thousands of screens will crowd around the action and everyone has to scoot their screens around to be able to see). Yet people can open and close these screens in any physical location at any time, but only if they are wearing special wearable computers.... So are these screens holograms, or physical presences? If they are physical, how do they appear and disappear? If they are holograms, why are they limited by physical rules? And they must contain cameras, which just confuses things more. If McIntosh had an explanation for this, I might have found it interesting, but it makes no rational sense, and seemed to me to just be a sloppy and lazy way for him to let characters interact across distance. I realize that it can be annoying when an author slows down the pace of a story to explain technology, but I think it's far more egregious to have technology that doesn't make sense and not explain it.So overall - interesting premise, interesting characters, very poor execution. I thought about abandoning the book several times, but found the characters just intriguing enough to stick with it... now that I have finished it, I wouldn't quite go so far as to say I regret it, but I wouldn't have missed anything if I hadn't finished it.
    • 5/5
      This book was amazing! The way the chapters were divided into separate points of view was phenomenal and so well done. The concept of the story was intriguing. It had a totally different image of the future that I've ever come across, and I love that it had feminist aspects throughout the story. I was hooked from the very beginning and I couldn't put it down. This is the first novel I've read by Will McIntosh, and I will definitely be looking for more of his work.
    • 3/5
      I have read two books by Will McIntosh: Love Minus Eighty and Hitchers. My biggest complaint about both of them is that quite a few chapters/pages do not have a goal, point, or plot. The story line is just a bunch of people reacting to things. With this book, Love Minus Eighty, the climax for me was the "bride" coming alive. That was exciting, but it happened with a lot of the book left to read. Then there was a bit about the boy/girl trying to get together. It just kind of went on and on and on ... That is a big negative for me, but this book has big positives too. I think about the characters, and the setting was amazing. I will read more from this author. I hope his plotting gets better.
    • 4/5
      I was sent a gratis copy of the book by the publisher.Love Minus Eighty is based on McIntosh's acclaimed short story "Bridesicle," published in Asimov's. The premise is disturbing: young women preserved by cryogenics and revived for minutes at a time to be "dates" for wealthy men. If the man likes her enough, he can shell out the millions to repair the damage that caused her death, and make her his legally-bound wife. The idea that something like this would be allowed by society at all was my biggest hang-up with the novel--it's women as chattel, to an extreme.Past that issue, though, Love Minus Eighty is deep, emotional, and strangely plausible. This is a fully-realized future New York City after some sort of unspecified apocalypse. The internet has evolved into systems that connect to people's bodies and monitor everything as a kind of competing, streaming reality broadcast. There are a number of major characters--all who come to know each other through the course of events--though the main plot line involves Rob. Rob is distracted by a broadcast break-up with his socialite girlfriend and runs down and kills a young woman, Winter. When he finds out she's been doomed to be a bridesicle, she becomes his obsession. He struggles to earn the money to bring her back to life, minutes at a time.At heart it's a book about relationships against the complexities that come with new social dynamics of the future, and I was very impressed.
    • 5/5
      What I loved about this book was the totally new story line, so different. Yes, there is te poor damsel, the hero, the bad guy and the love story- but it is the totally new ( at least to me) staging of the story that I loved. This was a 2014 book pick of my former book club so I thank you guys because you always pick such neat reads that I probably wouldn't pick myself! Miss you guys :)
    • 5/5
      I have a confession to make: I'm a sucker for love stories. But not just any kind of love story would do, oh no, because I like my romance the same way I like my Fantasy -- gritty, transcendent, in-your-face, plus it helps if it's just a bit bizarre! Love Minus Eighty is definitely all this and more, as if you couldn't already tell from its exquisite tagline, "A novel of love and death in no particular order".Decades from now, dwindling resources have caused cities like New York City to practically fold in and build upon itself, creating a social stratification system that's even more segregated than what we know today. No doubt, the book paints a pretty bleak view of the future, but it's especially bad if you're one of the hundreds of dead women cryogenically frozen in dating farms, awaiting your lucky day when some rich man will like you enough to pay millions for your revivification before whisking you home to be his wife.And seriously, to think some of my friends complain about internet dating! Online dating sites have got nothing on the nightmare that are these dating farms, which charge male suitors thousands of dollars by the minute to "date" the dead women, whose consciousnesses are "awakened" for the session before the plug is pulled again and they go back to their state of non-existing. Will McIntosh expanded upon this idea from his award-winning short story "Bridesicle" (because that's what society in this world called the frozen women. Horrible, right?) for this novel, which follows a group of characters whose lives are all interconnected because of these dating farms.What a disturbing and yet fascinating basis for a story, and it's all set before a futuristic backdrop which seems so outlandish but feels familiar enough to make you feel uncomfortable at the same time. It's a world of digital information and social media on steroids, where attention seekers can be trailed by thousands of literal "followers", their floating user screens going wherever that individual goes. People wear systems on their bodies to connect them to the network, allowing them to call up and communicate with multiple contacts at the same time. The setting was so vividly described that at times I felt like I was watching a movie (oh why oh why can't this be a movie?!)But in spite of all the new technology, some things always stay the same. For one thing, people will still look for love, that timeless, formless, unshakeable deep connection to another soul. This makes Love Minus Eighty a sci-fi novel that's definitely more about the human story and less about the science and technology. Questions like how the dead can be brought back to life, or how these dating farms even manage to revive dead women for short periods of time aren't the point. Instead, what's important is the emotional impact of the story, and subsequently, the ethical implications of keeping women on ice and in limbo, basically according human beings who have the potential to live again less rights than what you'd give a dog in an animal shelter.I also have to say the focus on love and dating was a nice touch, not only as it's something practically everyone can relate to, but also because it makes the characters and their motivations feel that much more poignant. It's hard to really say whose perspective was my favorite -- Rob, Veronika, Mira, and even a couple of the supporting characters -- because they each had their own experiences which I found acutely heartbreaking and intense.Of course, this book wasn't perfect by any means, and I for one had some issues with some of the dialogue as well as the pacing, especially with the way it led up to the ending. However, the mere fact that I'm usually so persnickety about these things but was still able to overlook them meant that ultimately for me, Love Minus Eighty was all about the story and its provocative ideas. Above all, I enjoy books that make me feel (and here's where that whole "I'm a sucker for love stories" comes in), and this one was at once a very thoughtful commentary on the ways of the heart and just twisted enough for me to eat it up.
    • 4/5
      I was fortunate to read an “ARC uncorrected proof not for sale” 402 pages, sent to me by friend Melody, who got it for free at the ALA conference. This book is due out on June 11th, 2013, which is more than 7 weeks away, so if anyone would like a chance to also read this in advance, please email me or pm me, and I’ll be happy to pass it on to you. (This is only the tenth time I’ve had an opportunity to read a book in advance of its official publication date; I think it’s really fun to read a book early.)The premise here is fascinating. The world building is superb. I got very invested in many of the characters and their stories. I particularly appreciated how differences in poverty and wealth affected access to all the new technology, a variety of technologies, ranging from extremely nifty to unbelievably creepy, but all plausible, and all germane as it relates to the world today.For an uncorrected proof arc, it seemed surprisingly well done. The cover wasn’t all that appealing, but I was impressed with the lack of errors such as typos.While there were definitely some plot holes and some too neat wrapping up, I was so engrossed I bought it all anyway. And I enjoyed how the fate of two people was left a bit up to readers’ imaginations. The story feels finished to me, but I can definitely envision sequels/a series. I wouldn’t mind finding out what happens to these characters. Overall, I’m pleased with how things worked out.I can recommend this book to fans of speculative fiction, especially those readers who enjoy character driven books and stories about the not too distant future on earth, and those who enjoy reading books that take place in NYC, even if the NYC in the book differs significantly from that city’s present and past.