After World: A Novel

(Paperback)

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One of Los Angeles Timess Best Tech Books of 2023
One of San Francisco Chronicles Favorite Books of 2023

An intelligent, defiant (San Francisco Chronicle) debut that follows an Artificial Intelligence tasked with writing a novelonly for it to fall in love with the novels 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 Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far.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-7fbcs assignment is to capture Sens 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 Sens 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, creepydazzling, (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.

Author Bio

Debbie Urbanski is a writer, nature lover, and humanwhose stories and essays have been published widely in such places asThe Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy, The Best American Experimental Writing, The Sun, Granta, Orion,andJunior Great Books. A recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, she can often be found hiking with her family in the hills south of Syracuse, New York. After Worldis her first novel.