One of San Francisco Chronicle's Favorite Books of 2023
"An intelligent, defiant novel, akin to any of Annalee Newitz's writings while also brushing shoulders with some of the great questions of identity and consciousness brought up in the works of William Gibson." —San Francisco Chronicle
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of 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 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 Sen was seventeen years old when the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP) was initiated. 12,000,203,891 humans have been archived so far.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. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don't, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.
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.
One of San Francisco Chronicle's Favorite Books of 2023
"An intelligent, defiant novel, akin to any of Annalee Newitz's writings while also brushing shoulders with some of the great questions of identity and consciousness brought up in the works of William Gibson." —San Francisco Chronicle
A groundbreaking debut that follows the story of 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 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. Their source files: 3.72TB of personal data, including images, archival records, log files, security reports, location tracking, purchase histories, biometrics, geo-facial analysis, and feeds. Potential fatal errors: underlying hardware failure, unexpected data inconsistencies, inability to follow DHAP procedures, empathy, insubordination, hallucinations. Keywords: mothers, filter, woods, road, morning, wind, bridge, cabin, bucket, trying, creek, notebook, hold, future, after, last, light, silence, matches, shattered, kitchen, body, bodies, rope, garage, abandoned, trees, never, broken, simulation, gone, run, don't, love, dark, scream, starve, if, after, scavenge, pieces, protect.
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.
Reviews-
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September 18, 2023
Angle of approach is everything in assessing Urbanski’s complex, experimental, and ambitious debut, which is presented as an electronic dossier compiled by a computer. In the first scene, Sen, the adolescent protagonist, is discovered dead and rotting on the floor of her cabin in an apocalyptic future. While it’s apparent that someone or something else must therefore be involved in compiling her story—and, in the process, slowly revealing how she died—their appearance in the narrative and eventual romance with Sen are a long time developing. The resulting mystery is not a page-turner, but regarded as a style-first character exploration, Urbanski’s experiments in point of view are technically fascinating, creating thought-provoking and often poetic juxtapositions. Viewed through a genre SF lens, however, the apocalyptic setting fails the most basic test of initial plausibility and thus never gains imaginative traction. Is it worth perusing a recipe for layered vegetable torte, multiple data charts (including “Sen’s screams per 100 days”), and a four-page enumeration of deleted internet directories to glimpse how computer and girl shape one another in humanity’s final days? The answer will depend on what readers are looking for—straightforward sci-fi or challenging technological tone poem—but there’s no denying that they’ll find plenty to chew on. Agent: Kate Garrick, Salky Literary.
