Comments on After World by Debbie Urbanski

After World feels like an Old Testament wrath of God story but in a post-Voltaire "if god did not exist humanity would have to invent him" sort of way and with a dash of Children of Men (the superior movie), except for the lack of hope.

Humanity seems to have elevated an AI entity or entities to a god or omnipotent position and at points in the book there are references to that which was, is and will be. Comments like that feel like they are lifted straight out of Revelation. The AI god has observed humanity and found that its continued destruction of Creation to be worthy of punishment. Instead of a flood wiping out all humanity save the chosen few, a plague (named S.) is released that sterilizes every person of reproductive potential. The goal is to allow the planet and ecosystem to heal itself.

The messages issued from the authorities - whether these are simply the Al Gods, a human government or some combination - are that humans must be removed so that creation can heal. But weirdly, it feels as though one of the immortals (the narrator-bot) is pleading and trying to intercede for humanity. That maybe there is something worth preserving in material form. The Al gods are, to a degree, inscrutable and they seem incapable of relating to humans.

There's some feel that our AI [storyworker] is one of the angels trying to convince the higher systems (god) that humans are worth something, maybe even pity.

Funny though, in that interview in Esquire she doesn't seem to mention any of these things at all. Is this a case where the reader is projecting onto the book something the author never intended?

I found the book to be a much more engaging read that a lot of the reviewers on Amazon and goodreads. And I didn't find it particularly "experimental" or even that "challenging." Yes, it plays a bit with the occasionally unreliable narrator approach but on the whole, it's an elegy for humanity delivered by the last survivor & a lesser immortal making our case to god.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Can't Work? No Healthcare

It's time that the United States - and the MAGA party in particular - own its policy that if you don't work, you don't deserve healthcare. I was listening to NPR (I know, I know...) and there was a story about the ACA premiums exploding with the expiration of subsidies. They interviewed a doddering retiree (on Medicare, naturally) and it really should be quoted in full here: QUIRMBACH: Here, extending help for ACA enrollees does not have a lot of support. Stepping away from the game, Rita Schulte, a retiree who's on Medicare, the federal health program that covers most seniors, says the Obamacare enhanced subsidies should only be extended a short time, if at all. Schulte says for people who aren't retired like her, she wants bigger changes in the Affordable Care Act that lower costs for taxpayers. RITA SCHULTE: If they'd ever get it overhauled, maybe we wouldn't need all this extra help from the government because you can't rely on the governmen...
Read more

ICE & Theories for the Midterms

Image
Theory: ICE on the ground in cities is meant to accustom (and build an “excuse” – such as it is) for the public so when the midterms come around, the paramilitary thugs on the street are already in place to help out with voter intimidation. Who in their right mind will risk going out to vote unless they look like they are of northern European extraction? My unfinished idea today is that the reason that Seattle hasn’t been targeted much harder for ICE raids is that Washington has mail in voting. As in, the entire state votes by mail and there is really no opportunity in the state to vote in person even if you wanted to. Thus, there isn’t any real “efficiency” to wasting your agents intimidating a population that, due to logistical reasons, it doesn’t really make much sense to bother with. The juice isn’t worth the squeeze to use a modern idiom. ICE raids could be happening in rural areas, where a LOT of illegal immigrants are working in industri...
Read more

What Comes Next?

This should be a theme of discussion - Trump has largely destroyed the old order of the past 75 years. The old-school liberals might continue to fight some kind of rear-guard action to protect the institutions and processes but the foundational trust has been shattered and will take a generation at a minimum of careful rebuilding. The centrist liberals need to seize this opportunity to decide what gets built on the ashes in the United States. And there is a very real likelihood they will not even get to CHOOSE, they will have a selection of bad to worse choices placed in front of them... - International military position of the US: NATO, our Asian allies (South Korea, Japan, Taiwan), Israel, the Middle East. Do we want to espouse our "values"? Realpolitik? Isolationism? What does the world look like if the US simply withdraws? Can it? Does the world WANT us to? - Finance/Trade: free movement of labor to match free movemen...
Read more