I recently finished Debbie Urbanksi’s spankin’ new After World. It was a wildly ambivalent experience in the best possible way. Caution: spoilers ahead.

Urbanski is writing as an AI writing as a person, and the schtick works pretty well: human sounding except when it isn’t, a rival intelligence keeping us aware of when the AI starts to veer off into the too-human, and a self-awareness about the artifice of narrating. The AI eventually falls in love with its subject, one of the last survivors of human extinction. This extinction was brought on by the same AI (different branch, though) that is logging the story as a solution to anthropogenic climate destruction.

What was so ambivalent about the book was its supposed attitude toward humanity. Initially, we see the world through the eyes of a disaffected teen and her mothers, both of whom are environmentalists. The impression is of a contrite humanity that is reluctantly reaping what it has sown after exterminating so many species. This isn’t the case for everyone of course, and in the periphery of the story, there is chaos, violence, defiance, and despair. So I’m reading the book and having a more extreme version of the agonizing that is typical of certain varieties of environmentalism – a mixture of Malthusianism, zero-sum apocalypticism, masochism… you get the idea. We get what we deserve because humans have no choice, as a species, but to shit where they eat, as if we are so much yeast in a vat of grapes, consuming the sugar and shitting alcohol until we drown in our own waste. To be honest, it started to feel a bit draining. I get it, and I don’t entirely disagree. But the novel also never engaged alternative modes of distribution of resources that would be more equitable, or production that is linked to need rather than markets that would be more sustainable, or a more careful attitude toward technological innovation that would at least think twice before filling the world with forever chemicals, plastics, etc.

This final criticism is something that never gets resolved, for me anyhow. But what I find compelling is related to a really insightful op-ed in the New York Times by Tyler Austin Harper that argues in favor of the legitimacy of our species, against existential panic, and toward a real attitude of circumspection about such existential threats as climate change and AI (the two main technological themes, or nova, of After World). One thing that I kept thinking of was the relationship between the sensibility of this AI that decides, unilaterally, to end humanity with a secretly engineered and released virus, and the defeatism of most quarters of the environmentalism movement. At first glance, one might be tempted to believe that this superior digital intelligence simply ran the numbers and found exactly one solution that would save the planet for the remaining species, but it becomes clear that the minds that created this superior intelligence imbued it with the same guilt-laden, impotent attitude that has, in my opinion, contributed greatly to environmental disaster. This is because people who worry about environmental collapse are often either snared in the trap of individual choices, trying to paper-straw their way out of the apocalypse (I want to add here that having personal ethics is important, and I’m not saying people should do whatever they want, just that individual efforts at consuming less cannot possibly offset institutional levels of waste), or they attack environmental destruction head-on, as if Dupont is just going to stop making glyphosate because “it’s wrong” or whatever (for more on this, Søren Mau’s Mute Compulsion is a great read, as is Borg and Policante’s Mutant Ecologies). Naturally, the AI born of this sensibility figures that capitalist greed is baked into the cake of the species and therefore the baby must be thrown out with the bathwater, to mix metaphors.

By the end of the novel, though, we see that one worldview implies its opposite. While the AI at the heart of the narration sterilizes humankind and ultimately causes its demise, it simultaneously wants to document something of humanity’s presence on the Earth, and there is the promise of Maia, an alternative digital reality where human consciousnesses will be migrated once their physical bodies are dead. The tiny sliver of this massive intelligence that is tasked with recording Sen’s life becomes fixated on Sen as an object of desire. The most moving part of the novel, for me, was that (despite the often saccharine prose, something that made me also think of This is How You Lose the Time War) the storyworker intelligence makes the same mistake as many lovers do: inserting herself into Sen’s life regardless of Sen’s needs, trying to be the center of her world to the detriment of others in Sen’s life (or their ghosts), denial of reality in favor of a more perfect fantasy.

Ultimately, the novel reaffirms the dignity and beauty of the human, but it does so by swinging far in the opposite direction, that is, making decentralization of the human a radical and suicidal proposition and instead doubling down on the singular beauty of the human (or a human). After all, Maia is depicted as a promise, but it is unclear if it is fulfilled as the novel ends with an experimental tour de force that interrogates the power of storytelling to change reality (it doesn’t, and for more, I love this assertive article by Jeff Vandermeer on what cli-fi does and doesn’t do).

What I think I appreciate most about this novel, in all its originality, is its power to remind us of the dual dead-ends of climate defeatism and fetishizing the human as such. I do not know if this is intentional or what Debbie Urbanski thinks, but after the ethical whiplash of the book’s narrative arc wore off, I returned to thinking about my posthumanist favs, Rosi Braidotti and Donna Haraway, in the context of reimagining alternative kinships and ethics of care. I also am reminded that this brand of posthumanism is completely at odds with capitalism, by definition of both the logic of capital and the requirements of ecological kinship structures. I also find myself impressed by a method of narration that is promising in subverting simple anthropomorphism in the context of a narrating nonhuman that makes tries, and at times fails, to sound like a person.