SOLVED. Sci Fi-read a few years ago, not an old book-short stories by one author about the rise of technology and it’s eventual downfall [s]

[Clara]

This book is a collection of short stories by one author that take place in a progression of time.

The first short story is about two siblings one of them has a bad heart and so they do an operation where the other sibling gives up their heart for the first sibling the story ends with the first sibling feeling the others emotions through the heart.

The next short story is about a girl who the lower part of her body is robotic (I’m pretty sure she got into a car accident). A boy at her school finds out that she’s a cyborg and tells everyone else and they all tease her. This story ends with her pushing that boy in front of a car so he can experience being cyborg as well.

After this I don’t really know the order of the stories and I might forget to name some of the stories.

Some big religious figure goes around with his wife and daughter talking about how body modifications are bad. Then his wife dies and he gets half of her face grafted onto his face and the other half of her face grafted onto his daughters face against her will. After this he goes around promoting body modifications and his daughter goes around talking about how they are bad.

A boy’s body is modified so he is part dolphin so he can help Marine biologists by living with sea creatures and studying them. Over time he realizes that he’s kind of a prisoner and so he escapes out of the enclosure he works in to the ocean.

A boy was cryogenically frozen because he had a disease that could not be cured so his body would be preserved for when medication was created. Later, there was a war and borders changed and so another country became in possession of this place where his body was stored. They unfroze him and healed his body then modified him so he could become a slave on some other planet or moon mining something. He makes it back to earth and, with the help of a girl that he meets, is able to evade the police.

The final story takes place way in the future where everyone has some sort of body modification even if it’s just to make some of their organs stronger except for this one civilization which is not allowed to modify their body in anyway and has to live super old-fashioned. Everyone with the modifications starts to die because of modifications fail and some of the people from that one civilization run away and find out that they are the only humans left and they have to restart humanity without technology.

This is all that I can remember. Thank you so much for any help!

[Mai]

You remembered a lot! This book came up searching online and, from the reviews, seems likely to be your book!
Stronger, Faster, and More Beautiful by Arwen Elys Dayton.

[Clara]

That’s it, thank you so much!