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A review by okevamae
After World by Debbie Urbanski
5.0
After World is a climate disaster story and a postapocalyptic story – though the climate disaster is not what destroyed society and killed off humanity, at least not directly. It’s really about what happens when a superintelligent AI decides that the only way to save the Earth is to get rid of humans, and what happens when a different AI tasked with documenting the life of the last human on Earth starts to care about its subject.
This is a pretty bleak story, but a fascinating one, with an unreliable narrator – the Storyworker AI is reconstructing Sen’s life after her death and often inserts things it couldn’t know just be observing, like the characters’ internal thoughts. It also at times changes the details of the story from what happened to what it wishes had happened, because this is as close as it can come to shielding Sen from unpleasantness. It’s also, as a computer program, forbidden from knowing certain things. It’s a fascinating perspective, though it makes figuring out the real story pretty tricky. There are excerpts from other books and artifacts both before and after the apocalypse that shed light on what exactly happened. You’ve really got to read between the lines on this one, and honestly, I’m not at all sure that my understanding of what went on is the correct one, as I was sometimes confused, particularly at the end. But the story that I did glean from it was compelling and very interestingly constructed.
CW: suicide, sexual assault (implied)
Representation: mention of lesbian characters and relationship, possible asexual character
I received an advance copy of this ebook from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
This is a pretty bleak story, but a fascinating one, with an unreliable narrator – the Storyworker AI is reconstructing Sen’s life after her death and often inserts things it couldn’t know just be observing, like the characters’ internal thoughts. It also at times changes the details of the story from what happened to what it wishes had happened, because this is as close as it can come to shielding Sen from unpleasantness. It’s also, as a computer program, forbidden from knowing certain things. It’s a fascinating perspective, though it makes figuring out the real story pretty tricky. There are excerpts from other books and artifacts both before and after the apocalypse that shed light on what exactly happened. You’ve really got to read between the lines on this one, and honestly, I’m not at all sure that my understanding of what went on is the correct one, as I was sometimes confused, particularly at the end. But the story that I did glean from it was compelling and very interestingly constructed.
CW: suicide, sexual assault (implied)
Representation: mention of lesbian characters and relationship, possible asexual character
I received an advance copy of this ebook from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.