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A Novel
by Jayson Greene
Book Reviewed by:From the author of Once More We Saw Stars comes a gripping novel about four intertwined lives that collide in the wake of a mysterious tragedy. Set in a near-future world where the boundaries between human and AI blur, the story challenges our understanding of consciousness and humanity.
Anna is shattered by the violent death of her son, Alex, and tormented by the question of whether it was an accident or a suicide. Samantha is Alex's best friend, and the only eyewitness to his death. She keeps returning to the cliff where she watched him either jump or fall, trying to sift through the shards. Aviva is an "upload," a digital entity composed of the sense memories of a human tether. But she's "emancipated," having left her human behind. Set free from her source and harboring a troubling secret, she finds temporary solace in the body of Cathy, a self-destructive ex-addict turned AI professor and upload-rights activist.
With UnWorld, Jayson Greene envisions a grim but eerily familiar near-future where all lines have blurred—between visceral and digital, human and machine, real and unreal. As Anna, Cathy, Sam, and Aviva's stories hurtle toward each other, the stakes of UnWorld reveal themselves with electrifying intensity: What happens to the soul when it is splintered by grief? Where does love reside except in memory? What does it mean to be conscious, to be human, to be alive?
Each of the four narrators has a distinct voice and provides a unique view on the events of the book. Anna's sections are insightful into the nature of maternal grief; Samantha's show the emotional toll of witnessing death firsthand; and Aviva's sections bring AI's worldview into the novel, demonstrating the autonomy and branching personality of uploads who have emancipated...continued
Full Review
(668 words)
(Reviewed by Callum McLaughlin).
Hanif Abdurraqib, author of There's Always This Year
UnWorld is a richly layered, deeply intimate novel that holds a mirror to the depths of our own loneliness and offers a meditation on how to continually love ourselves through a cascade of grief that changes but doesn't end. Suleika Jaouad, author of Between Two Kingdoms
Gripping, tender, haunting, and so gorgeously written, UnWorld is a staggeringly beautiful debut novel. With nuance and subtlety, with grace and deep feeling, Jayson Greene writes about the most ancient of human stories of love and grief, alongside the pressing, hypermodern concerns of the digital age, like artificial intelligence. On an idea level, on an emotional level, and on a sentence level, I was entranced.
In Jayson Greene's novel UnWorld, people can create sentient copies of their memories. The concept of creating a digital afterlife may sound strictly from the realm of science fiction, but attempts are already underway to make it a reality. It's known as "mind uploading" and is a form of transhumanism, a movement that advocates using technology to enhance and transcend humans' cognitive and bodily functions.
The essence of what makes us who we are—our thoughts, feelings, memories, and personalities—is believed to be encoded into a highly complex web of neurons and synapses in our brain. In theory, if an exact copy could be made of your neurological blueprint, it could be replicated or transferred digitally, allowing a ...
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