Welcome to the early 22nd century. Social media connects the elite in real time, and the digital divide has birthed a divide so complete it has manifested a near-complete physical disconnect. And while our mortality has not been conquered, reanimation has been perfected for those who can afford it. For those who can't, there is 'freezing insurance.' And for pretty, young women who can afford insurance, but not reanimation, there is a partial life in the 'bridesicle' dating service, where if you're pretty and willing enough, a one-percenter might marry you on your deathbed before taking you home as a bride-slave.

Will McIntosh's short story "Bridesicle" won both the Hugo Award and Asimov's Reader Poll in 2010, and was a finalist for the same year's Nebula Award. Love Minus Eighty is based on the short story and a brilliant dystopian look at a future that forecasts many of today's headline issues. McIntosh offers a very engaging world where the storyline shifts between High Town and the suburbs, contrasting the have's and have-not's of the world. Looking at the social changes, it feels like McIntosh did a good job of taking some of our current systems such as social media and incoming advancements such as life-expansion and autonomous systems forward in ways that are both promising and sour to current tastes.

The forward shift of social media is a great example the positive and negative. Personal systems allow individuals to access a futuristic Internet, enabling multiple conversations at the same time. Characters often meet IP (in-person) while 'subvocalizing' other conversations, a growth of multitasking. If you can't be there physically, you can create a screen - a real-world avatar - to move around. Screens can be used to follow people of interest, to watch distant events in realtime, or even to travel. The farther you cast your screen, the more it costs, but screens can go nearly anywhere unless a block is placed over a private location such as a home, business, or vehicle. Those who seek fame attempt to build a following by maintaining an ever-present group of screens that start to reward the focus of interest at 1000 viewers - the point at which you get paid for representing the brands you wear or use.

While those advancements are important to the story, the core advancement is medical. Cryofreezing keeps the dead from decaying, but also able to be partially reanimated for conversation. For those wealthy enough or important enough for their business to pay to bring them back to life, death is a horrible event from which you recover. As with today's corporate issues, profit drives many ways these advancements are used. Freezing insurance offers an escape from one of mankind's greatest fears:

Nathan sighed. “You really don’t understand the true purpose of freezing insurance?”

“The true purpose?”

Nathan looked around, like he was checking to make sure no one could overhear, studiously ignored the seven or eight screens hovering in the backseat. “It’s about coping with our fear of death.”

“Oh, really?”

Nathan nodded as he pulled into the parking stacks across the street from Venus de Milo’s. She suddenly wondered why they always went here, of all the restaurants in High Town.

“Think about it,” Nathan said as they got out. “If you’re frozen when you die, there’s only a minuscule chance you’ll ever be revived, but there is some chance.” He held his thumb and forefinger close together. “That tiny millimeter of chance takes the edge off our fear of death. As the lights are going out, you don’t know for sure it’s the end, so it’s not as terrifying.”

Veronika nodded tentatively.

“Picture yourself as a corpse in a coffin, buried in the ground, decomposing.”

She didn’t want to picture herself as a corpse in a coffin. If she did, there was less chance she’d cancel her freezing insurance. “So you’re saying people break their backs, some working two jobs, so they can afford a hundred and fifty thousand a year in insurance, all to cope with the existential terror of nonexistence.”

Nathan considered. “I wouldn’t use all of those jewel-encrusted NYU-grad-school words, but yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”

Drilling down further, the primary abuse of this technological and medical advancement is another profit-driven service, Cryomed dating, where the lonely and/or perverted can go shopping for a lover, spouse, or family member to spend their life with. 'Bridesicles' don't have a lot of options to regain life and are picked over by the super wealthy with the funds to pay for their reanimation. Creche-side weddings are often contracts of indebtedness where the bride has almost no rights, and face a future of short interactions with potential buyers or the permanence of deep freeze.

'Bridesicles' offers a glimpse of this future, focusing on the interactions between the corpses and their 'dates'. Strangely, the short story is more upbeat, playing out a different feel than the novel. Love Minus Eighty is more of a love story, with the plot revolving around a strange relationship that takes 90% of the novel to develop. If I had to identify a combination of known media, I'd say it's Sex and the City set in a William Gibson future. And while half of that might not sound like your average (or even desirable, depending on your tastes) science fiction, it's also why the novel is brilliant and explores many topics left untouched by most literature.

If you're looking for a great story that breaks the form of most science fiction and feels out our future social norms, Love Minus Eighty is an excellent read.