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After World

A Novel

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After World

Written by: Debbie Urbanski
Narrated by: Sura Siu, Emily Tremaine, Cindy Kay, Kevin R. Free
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About this listen

One of Booklist's Top 10 SF/Fantasy and Horror Debuts: 2024
One of
Los Angeles Times’s Best Tech Books of 2023
One of
San Francisco Chronicle’s Favorite Books of 2023
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 Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far.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.

©2023 Debbie Urbanski (P)2023 Simon & Schuster Audio
Adventure Post-Apocalyptic Science Fiction Fiction
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What the critics say

"Conceptually brilliant, Urbanski's debut is a tragic story that embraces philosophical musings rather than a violent catastrophe."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."AudioFile

What listeners say about After World

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    3 out of 5 stars
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Brutal Listen

Just like the lives of the people in this book, the best part is when the book ends. The story isn’t that good, and turning it into an audiobook made it worse.
There’s a bunch of jargon that could be easily glossed over in a book, but the reader reads it all, command prompts, file names, everything.

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Unique and interesting

A bit difficult to follow, which I'm sure was intentional, but the story unfolds in a unique but emotional way. Narration was impeccable.

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