What are we do to do with the upcoming climate catastrophe? Oh, I’m not prepared to answer, or really even speculate, but one future, as explored in Debbie Urbanski’s deeply imaginative, AI-Cli-fi novel After World is hopefully not the answer. A virus is released to sterilize the population, and humanity takes itself out, suicide by suicide, death by death, until all that remains is a woman, Sen, whose job it is to witness the last rural days of humanity. Using Sen’s journals (and all the other surveillance state tools), an AI entity writes her life story, telling us how the world ended, how Sen’s family died, and what it feels like for a people to outlive their utility to the earth. (A refrain through this: who deserves and what deserves to live and why.)
In this American future, if your neighbor hurts the environment? Get out your gun. If your mother is starving, and you want to share the rations you receive for your work as a witness with her? Don’t worry. The food will make her throw up in a river. The food is designed to only work with your personal biology. AI runs this future, sends you drones to collect your journals and deliver you your rations. If you’re lonely? Log onto the system and argue with A.I., search for other lone survivors. Watch the planes (“Exit ships”) explode like fireworks, an explosive method people can choose to end their lives. If that’s too much for you, the government has a pill for it. We are a wicked people, right? And if we can’t control ourselves, then maybe it’s right that we end it all. (Of course not.)
I’m really just describing the opening of the book. Nothing spoiled here—death is life in this novel, and what happens after is the work. Humanity is getting uploaded into After World, a virtual eden where we can do no harm. We’re shepherded into this new life by a great network of Artificial Intelligence who has been watching us, amassing the details of each person’s life, if we so choose to keep our data for the next, better life. If not, we can delete it all. Heaven, kind of, by choice, sort of.
But what makes up a life? And can artificial intelligence properly tell our story? While we read the journals, learn the new vocabulary (Urbanski is a master of various forms. The dictionary definitions in this novel function as cliff hangers, filling in various backstory like I’ve never seen definitions do before.), and watch as this A.I. learns how to write, as its AI boss critiques the storyteller for features deemed too creative (Let’s just say that the A.I. boss is not a fan of James Woods’ How Fiction Works.) It’s like watching a writing student learn what makes writing work, AKA what are the limits and pleasures of PoV, AKA what it is to get real close to a person’s consciousness. It can occasionally feel like falling in love.
What does this look like, for an AI entity to fall in love with the subject of their work? With a dead teenager whose story it must tell? Unlike the forced future-thinking of the apocalypse (Think of the re-wilding that will occur once the dogs pick at your flesh! Think of the Elephants freed from the Zoo taking over New York! Extinction no more!), the entity realizes the importance of the past to Sen, and it figures out what to make what mattered to Sen reappear to her, in ghosts, in feelings, in (fought-for) fictions.
I finished the novel in a couple days. A lot of my pleasure as a reader came from the ideas in the book—the wild imagination of Debbie Urbanski. I felt like a child: amazed. There’s no moral preening (except for the propagandistic idealism of the people and beings who decided to end everyone’s world, which comes across in very funny found documents with reader’s guides.). You sense the author’s love for the environment through the descriptions of the woods, of the fauna and flora, of the time spent giving dimension to that which is being discarded—not just the animal and plant life here. Humanity too. I loved this novel.