The genre of After World is still often referred to (see The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction) as “The Last Man,” from its genesis in the early nineteenth century in various novels and poems using that title, including, of course, the famous work by Mary Shelley. It can just as well be “The Last Woman” and indeed is so here: Sen, the central character (or the central human character) is charged with describing her experiences in the last days of the human race, during the time known as the Great Transition, when it has been decided that the extinction of humanity is the best option for the long-term survival of the planet.

Overseeing Sen, or even in some way creating her, is an AI, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, who seems to be using the journals and recordings of Sen’s life and experiences to create a model record after the fashion of one of our human cultural artefacts, the novel. (“Additionally, 64,213 novels were read to learn the craft of human documentation.”) Overseeing “storyworker” is another, more powerful AI, “Emly,” the Director of the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP). We piece the story together from Sen’s journals, records, reports, and extracts from other witnesses of the last days of humanity; from “storyworker’s” own selection of relevant facts; and the messages and eventual arguments between “storyworker” and “her” superior.

Both formally and thematically, After World is a complex and challenging novel: it takes place, for instance, both over several decades and something under six minutes, and it contains pages of almost random listings. It’s a novel which manages to be shocking, alarming, depressing, and sardonically comic. On one level, it is a straightforward science-fiction apocalyptic novel of the kind we are all familiar with. It is easy enough to get a picture of all of this. It’s the conclusion we are heading towards—climate change, the extinction of most forms of animal life, obviously; but there also seems to have been a war with aliens. To save the planet, humanity has volunteered (or very possibly has been volunteered by the super-AI JENNI who, allegedly, has been asked to devise the “Great Transition” plan) to become uploaded into a “digital” metaverse called Maia, which is described in a number of contradictory ways in different contexts, and to fall prey to a virus which has sterilised everyone. Maia offers us an opportunity to become

[a] better version of ourselves. The best version! An optimized version unable to damage ecosystems, consume finite resources, or enact harm. A version of ourselves that is being given a second chance and, if that chance doesn’t work out, we will be given a third chance, and a fourth if necessary, and a fifth chance, and so on.

We can believe that if we want (although other accounts suggest that humanity has been “asked” to embark upon a process of mass suicide). And the actual descriptions of actual human reactions—which we see largely through the shattering human ecologies of Sen, her mothers Dana and Lindsy, and the surrounding areas of Syracuse, New York—are far less romantically cosy than this cover story. This is, after all, a post-apocalyptic novel.

And yes, post-apocalyptic novels can be cosy, as we are reminded in the course of After World. Such novels, we’re told, were enjoyed by people fantasising about end times “because the answers they made up were exciting, violent, escapist, bestselling, and purposeful, with a hopeful twist at the end.” Another set of reports we read are compiled by one Wynn Zable who confesses “I used to write science fiction, mostly dystopias and apocalyptics. People used to read those books for fun.” It seems that when it comes to experiencing apocalypse, being told by science fiction how to react is no use at all. Those of us who have read and enjoyed far too much dystopian fiction will perhaps find this aspect of After World funnier than those who are less experienced in the field, although the humour is dark in the extreme: the “exit pills” with which the overwhelmed can commit suicide are “rumored to be a delicious grape flavor”; the “exit ships” in which people escape the planet don’t seem to go anywhere. Science fiction, as Urbanski somewhat gleefully reminds us, famously gets things wrong. In this novel of human disappearance and natural “rewilding,” we read of an “awakening world” in a very different context than we might find it in, for example, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014).

So this is a science fiction novel which doesn’t put much store in science fiction. It is also a novel which doesn’t put much store in the traditional structures of the novel—despite the 64,213 examples which “[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc” draws upon. We learn about this future and how our present plummeted towards it by means of scattered notes and comments, sometimes in what might be called “infodumps,” at other times in hints and statements that are picked up and amplified later. Nonlinear fiction is by no means always difficult to deal with, and neither is unreliability of narrative voice—here, the way Urbanski shows the difficulty and delicacy of “storyworker” coming to empathise with her subject is particularly clever, and is also what turns this into a genuine novel rather than an experiment with form or a leap onto a contemporary bandwagon.

Emly’s “launch statement” tells us that “once humanity’s corporeal presence is gone from the planet, each human life that has not opted out will be assigned a storyworker tasked with compiling an energy-efficient and optimized version of that human’s life.” This is, then, not so much a story about an AI achieving agency or autonomy (though it might be partly that), but very much one about the relationship between Storyteller (or this particular “storyteller”) and Story.

Like many of us who have worked on biography, poor old [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc falls in love with her subject. And all this develops within the interesting, even alarming, new paradigm of AI “creativity.” In other words, one other way of reading After World is—and yes, this is complicated!—as a novel about an AI writing a novel, written in the style of an AI writing a novel, in the fashion in which we may currently be seeing AIs approaching creativity. There are frequent sections where narrative simply breaks down and becomes detail—useful detail perhaps, but nevertheless the repetitive noting down of every little fact, not the selective approach of a skilful human author who might emphasise a few objects, investing them with significance to imply the presence of many others:

In the various drawers of the cabin, Dana discovers 17 empty soy chip wrappers, a box of candles, twine, a ruler, rubber bands, a jar of crystals, and a 12-inch piece of ribbon. One of the drawers won’t open. One of the drawers is empty. One of the drawers contains a soup ladle and paper scraps on which the previous cabin occupant made a list of what frightened them …

Over the past 18 years, in various rooms of this house, and also in the previous house where Sen had been born, Lindsy has smoothed Sen’s hair with the soft palm of her hand 9,598 times. A direct correlation can be established between the number of times a mother has smoothed their child’s hair and the amount that the mother will be missed (see the following graph).

The narrative is also studded with quotations, extracts, and references from “contemporary” essays, reports, articles, and works of fiction, in the manner of anxious students trying to impress by showing their breadth of reading. There are lists of vocabulary for the “End of the Anthropocene,” coding, transcripts of “Humannetwork” exchanges, even a ghost which may or may not be actual or symbolic. This does not make the book quick or easy reading, but like Mark Z. Danielewski’s metafiction-horror House of Leaves (2000), another book picked out to read by one of the characters, it forces the reader to slow down and think. After World is not a novel which will be to everyone’s taste: when I started it, I was not sure I was going to enjoy it. Having finished it, I am going to stick my neck out and say that, although it is (at time of writing) barely 2024, this is going to feature in my next list of “Best SF of the Year.”