What if your perfect hermaphrodite match existed on another planet? What if you could suddenly see through everybody’s skin to their organs? What if you knew the exact date of your death? What if your city was filled with doppelgangers of you?

Forced to navigate these bizarre scenarios, the characters search for solutions to the problem of how to survive in an irrational, infinitely strange world. In dystopias that are exaggerated versions of the world in which we live, these characters strive for intimacy and struggle to resolve their fraught relationships with each other, with themselves, and with their place in the natural world. We meet a wealthy woman who purchases a high-tech sex toy in the shape of a man, a rowdy, moody crew of college students who resolve the energy crisis, and orphaned twin sisters who work as futuristic strippers–and we see that no one is quite who they appear.

I borrowed this book through my local library app, Borrowbox. Recently I’ve developed a fondness for short story collections (providing the stories are within my preferred genres) and also an obsession to read books that have a similar vein to Black Mirror (the TV show). After reading the blurb (posted above, taken from Goodreads), I decided that this would be right up my alley.

I’ve never come across such a mixed bag of likeable stories in one book. Normally in a short story collection such as this, I would expect to like the majority of them and maybe only come across one or two that I wasn’t keen on. However, that wasn’t the case.

The best stories in this book, in my preferred order, are:
The Doppelgängers – A new mum finds that her entire town is filled with people exactly like her. I felt that I could relate to this one. I met a lot of new mums when I was also a new mum and although we weren’t identical in looks, our outward appearances and state of lives where eerily similar (the joys of night feeds and new babies).
The Knowers – A woman finds out the exact date of her death and has to live with that knowledge until the date in question. I didn’t relate to this one (I have no desire to know the date of my death) but I did like reading it. The story made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, in a weird-knowing-when-im-going-to-die kind of way.

As for the rest of the stories in the book, whilst some of them were better than others, they have left no lasting impression on me nor can I remember what they are about.

As for the main reason I picked up this book, the “Black Mirror” vibe, I definitely got that on some of the stories but not all of them.