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Debbie Urbanski's 'After World': An unflinching, bleak, vivid tale of humanity's final days.
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Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading

The Simon & Schuster cover for Debbie Urbanski's 'After Worlds.'

Debbie Urbanski's 'After World' (permalink)

Debbie Urbanski's debut novel After World is an unflinching and relentlessly bleak tale of humanity's mass extinction, shot through with pathos and veined with seams of tragic tenderness and care:

https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/After-World/Debbie-Urbanski/9781668023457

I first encountered Urbanski in "An Incomplete Timeline of What We Tried," an experimental short story on Motherboard's brilliant Terraform science fiction portal:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwvgeq/an-incomplete-timeline-of-what-we-tried

"Incomplete Timeline" is a list of climate remediation steps "working back from human extinction," like "increased military fortification of national, provincial, and state borders," "the founding of several utopias," and "redefine the word wilderness."

These items begin with a climax, or perhaps an anticlimax: "The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus."

This is the jumping off point for After World, which expands this final item to the action of a wrenching tale whose backstory is the list's remainder. Sen Anon – the story's semi-protagonist – is 18 years old when the world learns that every person alive has been sterilized and so the human race is living out its last years.

The news triggers a manic insistence that this is a good thing – long overdue, in fact – and the perfect opportunity to scan every person alive for eventual reincarnation as virtual humans in an Edenic cloud metaverse called Gaia. That way, people can continue to live their lives without the haunting knowledge that everything they do makes the planet worse for every other living thing, and each other. Here, finally, is the resolution to the paradox of humanity: our desire to do good, and our inevitable failure on that score.

And so the Earth is converted to a place of mass suicides, as people gurn and mug while boarding airplanes filled with explosives so they can go out in a literal blaze of glory. The food will run out soon, and the government makes sure everyone has a suicide pill for the day when the hunger grows too intense. Not everyone is lucky enough to get on one of the suicide flights, and, being eager to see themselves off before they harm the planet further, just hang themselves in the garage or jump off a roof. They are counted as heroes, but also nuisances, because disposing of the bodies is a lot of work.

But some people – young people – are given a mission to live on for as long as possible. These are the observer/recorders who are charged to spend the last days of the species closely watching the return of the natural world, the seeing off of humanity, and to write it all down in longhand in a succession of notebooks that are taken away by drones. This is part of the story humanity cooks up for itself about extinction being a noble choice, rather than a chaotic act born of desperation.

Sen Anon is one of these observers, and her mothers take her to a remote cabin to live out (and observe) the last of humanity's days, ensuring she is settled in and then killing themselves. After all, without them, Sen Anon's limited food supply – meagerly supplemented by drones in proportion to the quality of the observations in her notebooks – will stretch further.

Much of the novel takes the form of Sen Anon's notebook observations, countersunk with an omniscient third-person narrator who is revealed to be [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc, a software agent involved in the project to recreate all those dead humans in the Gaia metaverse.

[storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very unreliable narrator, who reprograms itself through the course of the story, all the while muttering asides to itself about the theoretical basis for telling Sen's story this way. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc struggles with a supervisory AI that has been charged with overseeing all the [storyworkers], but which can't – or won't – rein in [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc as [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows more involved in Sen's life.

This experimental storytelling style (supplemented by found texts from humanity's dying, like a glossary of terms to be retired and new terms being created by a linguist who is starving to death as they complete their task) creates a contradictory narrative distance and closeness.

It's a curiously flawed omniscience that's allows Urbanski to capture the yawning, bottomless horror of the climate emergency of today and on the horizon. I don't think I've ever experienced the kind of sustained, deepening existential dread that After World created, chapter by chapter.

To sharpen this, Sen's mothers – scientists who were given exceptions to the no-child policy because their work was deemed essential to the now-abandoned project of saving humanity – are grimly supportive of the mass suicide project. When Sen's own horror creeps up on her, her mothers are sharp and often unkind, with only the smallest flashes of love and sorrow for their daughter escaping their facades, all the more vivid for their rarity.

In contrast, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc grows ever more sympathetic to Sen and the rest of vanished humanity. [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc is a very convincing alien with motives and perspectives that are profoundly nonhuman, and yet, the compassion and love are unmistakable.

Of After World's two protagonists, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc might be the more relatable. It takes an alien point of view to truly see humanity's flawed glory, irredeemable and irreplaceable. If you reveled in the nonhuman umwelts on display in Laura Jean McKay's 2020 debut The Animals In That Country, [storyworker] ad39-393a-7fbc will stretch your brain and imagination in similar ways:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/27/im-a-backdoor-man/#doolittle

After World is a book that goes hard. Pitiless, merciless and relentless, it takes you to the darkest depths of climate despair and reveals the indestructible beauty at our species' core.

Hey look at this (permalink)

52 things I learned in 2023 https://medium.com/magnetic/52-things-i-learned-in-2023-a3bbb9f9323d (h/t Kottke)
Department of Transportation Issues $140 Million Fine for 2022 Southwest Holiday Meltdown https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2023-12-18-140-million-fine-southwest-cancellations/
The Robber Barons of Prison Tech https://slate.com/technology/2023/12/prison-telecom-gtl-viapath-jpay-securus-private-equity.html (h/t Naked Capitalism)

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This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago Norm Coleman tries to get Franken ballot tossed because the voter wrote, “Thank you for counting my vote.” https://web.archive.org/web/20081222013855/https://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/the_worst_ballot_challenge_of.php

#10yrsago Severed hand grafted to ankle, reattached to wrist a month later https://metro.co.uk/2013/12/16/severed-hand-saved-after-being-attached-to-mans-ankle-4232581/

#10yrsago Secretive TPP treaty could kill creator’s right to get copyrights back from studios, labels and publishers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/tpps-attack-artists-termination-rights

#5yrsago Livetweeting a toothbrush’s firmware update https://twitter.com/AndrewCrow/status/1074565600083492864

#5yrsago Malaysia charges Goldman Sachs with criminal complicity in multi-billion-dollar 1MDB fraud https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2018/12/18/goldman-sachs-fires-back-after-malaysia-charges-bank-in-1mdb-probe/

#5yrsago Lawsuit: US citizen suing CBP for coercing him into unlocking his phone during boarding at LAX https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5zny7/haisam-elsharkawi-lawsuit-against-us-government-cbp-dhs-unlock-phone

#5yrsago Sony won’t let you post “crap recordings” of a few seconds of your own Beethoven piano performance https://www.facebook.com/dheera/videos/10101580541973018/

#5yrsago Kansas judge tells government debt collectors they can’t hound a broke 58-year-old woman until her 84th birthday https://www.condemnedtodebt.org/2018/12/good-news-out-of-kansas-compassionate.html

#5yrsago Charter will pay $174.2m for defrauding New Yorkers over data speeds, the largest settlement ever paid by a US ISP https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/18/18146210/charter-spectrum-174-million-settlement-new-york-state-attorney-general-internet-speeds

#5yrsago Tumblr’s porn filter blocked Tumblr’s images illustrating what Tumblr’s porn filter won’t block https://gizmodo.com/tumblrs-porn-filter-flags-its-own-examples-of-permitted-1831151178

#5yrsago Debunking “ghost users”: MI5’s plan to backdoor all secure messaging platforms https://blog.cryptographyengineering.com/2018/12/17/on-ghost-users-and-messaging-backdoors/

#5yrsago Elizabeth Warren’s new bill: let the US government manufacture generic versions of overpriced, unavailable drugs https://theintercept.com/2018/12/18/elizabeth-warren-generic-drugs-bill/

#1yrago “Metaverse” means “pivot to video” https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/18/metaverse-means-pivot-to-video/

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing:

A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING
Picks and Shovels, a Martin Hench noir thriller about the heroic era of the PC. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS JAN 2025
The Bezzle, a Martin Hench noir thriller novel about the prison-tech industry. FORTHCOMING TOR BOOKS FEB 2024
Vigilant, Little Brother short story about remote invigilation. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM
Spill, a Little Brother short story about pipeline protests. FORTHCOMING ON TOR.COM

Latest podcast: The Internet’s Original Sin https://craphound.com/news/2023/12/17/the-internets-original-sin/)

Upcoming appearances:

Internet Con (Peculiar Book Club), Jan 11
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5UvzuJ1R4I

Recent appearances:

Enshittification: A Monopoly Story (Macro n Cheese)
https://realprogressives.org/podcast_episode/episode-255-enshittification-a-monopoly-story-with-cory-doctorow
Science Fiction and the Future of Science
https://council.science/podcast/science-fiction/
AI needs to work with humans — not replace us (CBC IDEAS)
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/artificial-intelligence-provocation-ideas-festival-1.7046841

Latest books:

"The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org). Signed, personalized copies at Dark Delicacies (https://www.darkdel.com/store/p3007/Pre-Order_Signed_Copies%3A_The_Lost_Cause_HB.html#/)
"The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).
"Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com. Signed copies at Dark Delicacies (US): and Forbidden Planet (UK): https://forbiddenplanet.com/385004-red-team-blues-signed-edition-hardcover/.
"Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com
"Attack Surface": The third Little Brother novel, a standalone technothriller for adults. The Washington Post called it "a political cyberthriller, vigorous, bold and savvy about the limits of revolution and resistance." Order signed, personalized copies from Dark Delicacies https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1840/Available_Now%3A_Attack_Surface.html
"How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism": an anti-monopoly pamphlet analyzing the true harms of surveillance capitalism and proposing a solution. https://onezero.medium.com/how-to-destroy-surveillance-capitalism-8135e6744d59?sk=f6cd10e54e20a07d4c6d0f3ac011af6b) (signed copies: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2024/Available_Now%3A__How_to_Destroy_Surveillance_Capitalism.html)
"Little Brother/Homeland": A reissue omnibus edition with a new introduction by Edward Snowden: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250774583; personalized/signed copies here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p1750/July%3A__Little_Brother_%26_Homeland.html
"Poesy the Monster Slayer" a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627. Get a personalized, signed copy here: https://www.darkdel.com/store/p2682/Corey_Doctorow%3A_Poesy_the_Monster_Slayer_HB.html#/.

Upcoming books:

The Bezzle: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books, February 2024
Picks and Shovels: a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books, February 2025
Unauthorized Bread: a graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, 2025

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https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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