What happens when the key to our planet’s survival means the extinction of humanity? This is the key question asked in After World, the debut novel of Debbie Urbanski. On the surface this is a novel about human extinction, ecological collapse, artificial intelligence, all of the hallmarks of the new Climate-Fiction genre, but After World is much more. To its core, this is a story about human nature, love, perspective, and how, in the grand scheme of things, despite it all, we persist.
I have written before about my love for apocalyptic fiction, it’s a strange genre. Morbid, bleek, despairing, but often the best apocalyptic fiction is suffused with light, with hope. After World is one of these novels. Do the humans survive? Well, no. But our stories survive, our memories, the thumbprints of our lives on the world. In many ways this story is the saving of our planet through the sacrifice of humanity, but there is also redemption through this sacrifice. There is hope that even without us, the world will not just persist, but thrive. There is hope that the love we place into the world will stay long after we’re gone.
I’ll let Simon and Schuster give you the rundown:
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of 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 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 Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far.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. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don’t, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.
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.
This novel is wholly original, innovative, raw, real, beautiful, heartbreaking, and full of so much heart as to be personally shattering.
In fact, once I finished the novel, in the clouded mind its ending elicits, I looked up the author, found her on Instagram, and slid into her DMs. This was one of those novels that made me instantly want to talk to the author, get inside her head. I was left with a million questions, and there was only one person I could ask.
Is this the first time I’ve tried to contact an author? No. But is this the first time an author wrote back? Yup!
Here’s what I wrote:
Hi Debbie,
I just finished After World and absolutely loved it. It was complex and inventive and textured and raw and, in the weirdest way, hopeful. You referenced Station Eleven in the book a lot which is one of my favorite books of the last few years, and like that one, I loved that After World wasn’t fully focused on the doom of death, but on the stories we’ve lived, or are yet to live, the power of being a witness, not just to death, but to life. Anyway, I loved it, and I know it’s a total long shot, and I’m not really anyone important, but I’d love to interview you some time for my substack.
Last year I wrote an article after reading Station Eleven about the need for hope in Apocalyptic Fiction, interviewing you about After World, and the philosophy behind it, could be a great companion to that. Here’s a link to that article.
Yes. I am shameless. But it worked!
My interview with Debbie Urbanski will be published here this weekend. We talked about a very wide range of topics including: climate change, fiction, Artificial Intelligence, parenting, and our mutual love of Ray Bradbury!
Here’s a short preview:
I love the idea of how a story changes depending on the angle and who’s telling it. I often talk about this idea of framing a story, that essentially how you frame the story can tell as much about the story as the story itself. Throughout After World there are a lot of really interesting framing choices, from point of view of the AI, Sen, the technical entries, etc. How did you find your perspectives and framing play a role in the storytelling as a whole, and how did it change, or define, the story itself?
“How you frame the story can tell as much about the story as the story itself” - yes! Long ago I did my undergrad degree in medieval history, and one thing I loved about that subject was the difficulty in figuring out what exactly happened in the past. We know what this person said happened, but they have their own motivations, biases, and blinders. I think, more than any literature class, studying medieval sources made me realize how relative reality is. With regards to Sen: I was interested in how, even at the end of the novel, we may not really know her. We probably know the storyworker narrator better than her. That feels like yet another loss to me - and another reason why Sen’s anger is justified. What I think is great about this kind of storytelling is that the reader gets to take an active role (like that of a historian) in trying to figure out – what exactly did happen? And what does this particular version of what happened tell us about the person or entity telling the story?
In the meantime, check out Debbie Urbanski’s Website, go to your local library or independent bookstore and get a copy, and make sure to eat some guacamole! (Trust me, it’s important!)
I haven’t even read the full interview yet, but I already need to read this book. It has also already given me several uncomfortable big questions.