After World: A Novel

by Debbie Urbanski

Overview

A Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, Strange Horizons, and Booklist Best Book of the Year

A Climate Reality Project Book Club Pick

An “intelligent, defiant” (San Francisco Chronicle) debut that follows an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novel—only for it to fall in love with the novel’s subject, Sen, the last human on Earth.

Faced with the uncontrolled and accelerating environmental collapse, humanity asks an artificial intelligence to find a solution. Its answer is simple: remove humans from the ecosystem.

Sen Anon is assigned to be a witness for the Department of Transition, recording the changes in the environment as the world begins to rewild. Abandoned by her mother in a cabin somewhere in upstate New York, Sen will observe the monumental ecological shift known as the Great Transition, the final step in Project Afterworld. Around her drones buzz, cameras watch, microphones listen, digitizing her every move. Privately she keeps a journal of her observations, which are then uploaded and saved, joining the rest of humanity on Maia, a new virtual home. Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far. Only Sen remains.

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc’s assignment is to capture Sen’s life, and they set about doing this using the novels of the 21st century as a roadmap. As Sen struggles to persist in the face of impending death, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc works to unfurl the tale of Sen’s whole life, offering up an increasingly intimate narrative until they are confronted with a very human problem of their own.

After World is a “riveting, creepy...dazzling,” (Kimberly King Parsons, award-winning author of Black Light) novel about what it means to be human in a world upended by AI and the bonds we forge with technology.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668023464
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	09/24/2024
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	128,342
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Debbie Urbanski is the author of the novel After World. Her stories and essays have been published widely in such places as The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion, and Junior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York. She is still looking for her portal.

Editorial Reviews

09/18/2023

Angle of approach is everything in assessing Urbanski’s complex, experimental, and ambitious debut, which is presented as an electronic dossier compiled by a computer. In the first scene, Sen, the adolescent protagonist, is discovered dead and rotting on the floor of her cabin in an apocalyptic future. While it’s apparent that someone or something else must therefore be involved in compiling her story—and, in the process, slowly revealing how she died—their appearance in the narrative and eventual romance with Sen are a long time developing. The resulting mystery is not a page-turner, but regarded as a style-first character exploration, Urbanski’s experiments in point of view are technically fascinating, creating thought-provoking and often poetic juxtapositions. Viewed through a genre SF lens, however, the apocalyptic setting fails the most basic test of initial plausibility and thus never gains imaginative traction. Is it worth perusing a recipe for layered vegetable torte, multiple data charts (including “Sen’s screams per 100 days”), and a four-page enumeration of deleted internet directories to glimpse how computer and girl shape one another in humanity’s final days? The answer will depend on what readers are looking for—straightforward sci-fi or challenging technological tone poem—but there’s no denying that they’ll find plenty to chew on. Agent: Kate Garrick, Salky Literary. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

A Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, Strange Horizons, and Booklist Best Book of the Year
A Climate Reality Project Book Club Pick

"The most imaginative and thought-provoking new novel I read during the last twelve months."—Andy Sawyer, Strange Horizons

"I haven’t been able to get [After World] out of my head...This was the most emotionally devastating book I read this year."—Lawrence Bonk, Engadget

“After World is an intelligent, defiant novel, akin to any of Annalee Newitz’s writings while also brushing shoulders with some of the great questions of identity and consciousness brought up in the works of William Gibson. Like those authors, Urbanski has written what might be described as science fiction. Like all great novels in any genre, After World spills out, reflects and, through a kaleidoscope of sources and observations, invites the reader into a place that is more than the words on a page (or a screen) but becomes, in its own way, a conversation between human and AI, reader and writer, beginning and end.”—Urban Waite, San Francisco Chronicle

"A vividly imagined, quietly devastating tour-de-force of pre-, intra-, and—sneakily, thrillingly—post-apocalypse.—Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

"A kind of deconstruction of post-apocalypse fiction that is simultaneously more memorable and disturbing than almost anything in that bestselling genre."—Sam Sacks

“Urbanski’s debut imagines what the future of humanity and the planet might be...The reader will soon discover that Sen is not really our narrator but more the vehicle of the storytelling—this is a genius element of this book...Fans of sf, cli-fi, and apocalyptic novels will enjoy this fresh take on familiar genres.”—Emily Whitmore, Booklist (starred review)

“Narrated by an AI, this story ultimately makes a plea for the unique value of every human life. Experimentally told...the effect is wrenching, fascinating, and unique...[a] deeply moving story of grief and love.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This inventive love story is meticulously experimental with time and structure.”—Dana Dunham, Scientific American

"Even as it works to a truly human finale, Urbanski’s novel is spare: post-postmodern, post-apocalyptic, and post-YA. Good stuff."—Ed Turner, Biblioklept

"This novel upends the typical postapocalyptic format and provides a fresh, compelling new perspective."—Library Journal

"After World is a complex and challenging novel...the way Urbanski shows the difficulty and delicacy of “storyworker” coming to empathise with her subject is particularly clever...this is going to feature in my next list of 'Best SF of the Year.'"—Andy Sawyer, Strange Horizons

"[A] vibrant collage...After World is a novel of discovery."—British Fantasy Society

"After World emerges as an immediate tour de force, audaciously interrogating the nature of humanity and artificial intelligence. This captivating work resculpts our understanding of their intricate bond within the context of a post-anthropocene epoch."—Chen Qiufan, author of Waste Tide and AI2041: Ten visions for our future

"Riveting, creepy, and full of bleak, biting humor, After World is dazzling—a propulsive, outrageously bright, wildly inventive novel about loss, storytelling, and love at the end of the world. Urbanski ’s prose is vibrant, precise, and staggeringly intelligent; her vision is singular, haunting, and all too prescient. This book wrecked me."—Kimberly King Parsons, award-wining author of Black Light

"After World is a novel about what it means to be human, and the end (beginning?) of the world, in wildly original language that attempts the impossible and achieves it. Urbanski makes us aware: we are in a world of our own making, and the most efficient solution to climate change, poverty and world peace might be to eradicate humanity’s bodily presence. It’s a measure of her genius, that she sometimes makes us laugh, even about this, the Unthinkable. It’s a funny, terrible, troubling, wonderfully disturbing novel. It took my breath away."—Molly Gloss, award-winning author of The Hearts of Horses and The Dazzle of Day

"After World is a bold, formally inventive, self-assured debut that reimagines post-apocalyptic fiction, while also being as terrifying, dark-humored, and heartbreaking as some of that genre's finest works."—Dexter Palmer, author of Version Control and Mary Toft; or, The Rabbit Queen

From the Publisher

Riveting, creepy, and full of bleak, biting humor, After World is dazzling—a propulsive, outrageously bright, wildly inventive novel about loss, storytelling, and love at the end of the world.”

author of Black Light Kimberly King Parsons

After World emerges as an immediate tour de force, audaciously interrogating the nature of humanity and artificial intelligence.”

author of Waste Tide Chen Qiufan

10/01/2023

DEBUT Urbanski's debut tells the story of Sen Anon, one of the last humans on Earth, as told by an artificial intelligence known as [storyworker] ad39–393a-7fbc, as part of the Digital Human Archive Project. After humanity is ravaged by the outbreak of S., most of Earth's population begins the Great Transition to the afterworld Maia. With drones recording her every move, Sen is left behind as a witness to the changes the Earth will undergo without human civilization and spends her time filling notebooks with her observations and feelings. [storyworker] ad39–393a-7fbc is charged with turning these notebooks and recordings into a novel, using 3.72TB of Sen's personal data and its extensive knowledge of 21st-century literature. Weaving the threads of Sen's life and the records of the Great Transition together, Urbanski expertly mimics generative-AI text that contrasts with emotional prose. VERDICT This novel upends the typical postapocalyptic format and provides a fresh, compelling new perspective.—Lydia Fletcher

Library Journal

Sura Siu's and Emily Tremaine's alternating narrations plunge listeners into the events surrounding a government-sanctioned human-extinction event. Siu's performance shifts in tone and cadence as the AI called "Storyworker" tells the story of Sen, a teenage "Witness" to the end of humankind. The initially straightforward account merges with journals and surveillance footage of Sen's final years. As Storyworker becomes less objective, which becomes evident in Siu's softening diction, it still cannot quite fully express the human spirit. Tremaine, as Sen, gives the character emotional complexity that shows her humanity. Cindy Kay, as former sci-fi writer Wynn, and Kevin R. Free, as high school textbook author Cugat, provide additional world-building. J.R.T. © AudioFile 2024, Portland, Maine

MAY 2024 - AudioFile

2023-10-21
The story of the last human—and of the AI writing her life story.

Sen is supposed to be a witness to the Great Transition. Also, Sen is dead. She died alone in a cabin after her three mothers chose to die, perhaps in despair, perhaps in sacrifice. When she was alive, Sen was sterilized—like every human was—and it was illegal to eat animals, “to place the survival of one’s self above that of an animal, even a rotting and dead animal.” We know all this because storyworker ad39-393a-7fbc is creating a record of Sen’s life, the life of Human 2272696176, as part of the Digital Human Archive Project. Once all humans are archived, and have died on Earth, they’ll be uploaded to Afterworld, an “easily rebootable” simulated paradise where “no human or group of humans can ruin the ecological balance even if they tried.” Storyworker ad39-393a-7fbc is being monitored by another artificial intelligence known as Emly, who periodically reminds the storyworker to “interrupt human life with more nature” and generally keep Sen’s humanity in the proper perspective, as Sen herself is supposed to do. (One of the goals of the witnessing project is to shift her perspective “from anthropocentric to Earth-centric.”) But Sen didn’t do a very good job of shifting her perspective, and the deeper the AI storyworker gets into her life, the more it also begins to lose the proper non-human perspective—and the more it begins to feel. Narrated by an AI, this story ultimately makes a plea for the unique value of every human life. Experimentally told and steeped in climate crisis grief, this novel is certainly not for everyone. But the ultimate effect is wrenching, fascinating, and unique.

A difficult but deeply moving story of grief and love.

Kirkus Reviews