A review of Love Minus Eighty

I imagine it's never easy to take a well-known and loved short story and turn it into a novel. Bits that worked in one format don't in the other. Favourite characters are subtly, or not so subtly, altered, whether out of necessity or because hindsight makes the author reckon that this way would be better. Will McIntosh's Love Minus Eighty suffers a little from this rewriting. The main character of his short story, Mira, becomes a bit player in the novel, which is probably a clever device to give him some free rein in the book, but does take a bit of getting used to if you're familiar with the original.

McIntosh also pulls one very interesting aspect of his technologically and medically advanced future and adds in a different one. In the short story, dead relatives can be invited to take up residence in people's heads and thereby live on and Mira spends much of her time thinking about her mother, who was not a welcome visitor. The moral and social implications of such an existence, as well as the guilt felt by Mira about not wanting her mother in her head and the anger that she let herself be talked into it, are only sketched in the short story and would have been fascinating to explore more deeply.

However, this kind of reincarnation is completely missing from Love Minus Eighty. Instead, the great technological advances are a sort of social media/Big Brother mash-up, where folks live all their lives in intimate contact with other people - friends or fans or both - and, of course, the revivification of cryogenically frozen people. 

For the first, every level of connectedness is explored in the novel, from those who want to be constantly plugged in to the system, living their lives in front of an audience, all the way through to people who don't want to be connected at all. This isn't untrodden ground for a technologically-advanced world, but McIntosh steps lightly with his characters and never gives us the impression that any of the ways they live their lives are the "right" ones. Neither social climbing always-on Lorelei, part-time user Rob nor regular plug-ins Veronica and Nathan are ever portrayed as anything other than the usual mix of good and bad intentions that make up every human being, none are evil or wrong for their relationship to their technology.

The moralising is reserved for the results of the central technology of the book, the practice of bridesicles - young women who can afford the insurance to be frozen - or are chosen to be frozen because of their looks - but can't afford to be revived and put back together again. For these women, the only hope lies in an excessively wealthy "date" deciding to spend the money to bring them back to life as their wife. The pure horror of such an existence comes through even more strongly in the book than the short story and the social contract of beauty for money is brought down to a brutish exchange that leaves neither side unsullied.

Although the morality of bridesicles is well explored, it is lacking a little in detail. The future of the book is not a utopia, but it's not a dystopia either and there's very little explanation given for why it is the way it is. We know there's been some kind of turmoil, known as the nanopocalypse, but we don't know what that was. We know that the technology to revive and fix people after they're dead exists, but not how it works or why it has always been and remains so expensive. Although the police show up once or twice, there's not much mention of the government, so it's difficult to figure out why there seems to be a strong grassroots campaign to get rid of bridesicles, but no protest at all about the fact that people who need certain healthcare to live are denied it. 

That such a situation exists is not unfathomable - after all, you could argue that the same thing happens today, but that no-one has anything to say about it seems a bit strange. At one point, two characters share a nod of understanding when one explains that his mother died of terminal cancer when her family was unable to raise the cash to save her - there's no railing against the powers that be over this, just unhappy acquiescence. While no-one wants all sci-fi books to be about the attempt to defeat a totalitarian, dystopian government, some context for such a society would be nice.

This isn't a book about the rampant capitalist depravity of a society that allows its poorer members to die unnecessarily, but it is a book about love and it's here the novel shines. McIntosh makes the case for love of all shapes and sizes, with plenty of sympathy even for those lonely desperate people who visit the bridesicle centre in the hopes that they can buy what they haven't been able to find or keep in the real world. Once again, there is no right or wrong, just people loving or trying to love as best they can - and it's this that lifts the novel from an intriguing premise and a few interesting characters to a warm, life-filled story.