After World Audiobook By Debbie Urbanski cover art

After World

A Novel

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Winner of the 2025 ASLE Creative Writing Book Award and the CNY Book Award for Fiction

A Los Angeles Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Engadget, Strange Horizons, and Booklist Best Book of the Year

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 Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far.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. Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Science Fiction Post-Apocalyptic Fiction Adventure

Critic reviews

"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
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The only reason I finished this was for my book club. I didn't enjoy any part of it. The story was mind-numbing and repetitive, way too long, and I couldn't make myself care about the main character or what happened to her. I spent the whole time wondering where the author was going with this. It's one of those books where the author seems to think they're being clever by leaving things unexplained and ambiguous. The world she builds in the beginning was not very believable, and attitudes and actions made little sense. I've really no idea how this book won any kind of award. I'm not usually this harsh, but this was a really unpleasant reading experience for me.

Monotonous and Aimless

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The performance was fine but not special. The style was very repetitive, a decision related to the tech, but it was way overdone. The book would have benefit from stronger editing.

Concept was not fulfilled

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Not my type of book. Total snooze fest, plot is choppy and nonsensical. You can do much better than this when it comes to sci-fi.

Just Awful

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I was expecting this to be weird. And it is. Very abstract. I think it had a political point related to climate change but I’m not quite sure what that point was. All that said, I’m glad I listened to it. But I can’t recommend it. Just know what you are getting if you buy this.

More interesting than enjoyable

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I'm an avid listener and have wide variety. I was excited about this book because of the concept but the execution was WAY to confusing.

REALLY TRIED

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