This novel follows four intertwined lives that collide in the wake of a mysterious tragedy, in a near-future world where the boundaries between human and AI blur.
Greene renders the suffering of his characters with the somatic specificity of a craftsman with the cruel advantage of proximity ... These are anguished pages, but they invite neither gawking nor wallowing nor the knee-jerk alchemy of relief and terror one often feels when the worst happens to somebody else. On the contrary, Greene’s meticulous characterization urges the reader toward a philosophy of human consciousness that acknowledges the obscurity of the mind while gently affirming two entwined, undeniable qualities of personhood ... Elegant.
A lightly speculative story where intelligence may be artificial, but emotions are painfully real ... Ambitious but flawed ... The world-building here is distractingly thin ... Every scene suggests new questions about the world, and most go unanswered ... Still, if the setting of UnWorld doesn’t convince, the emotions do ... Alex’s obsessions are harrowing in their inscrutability, but also believable ... This is a writer who knows grief ... The rawness of the upload’s pain, fully commingled with love and guilt, is easy to believe ... UnWorld, like most of its characters, seems caught between states. It’s not quite a fable, but neither is it speculative fiction ... Even if Greene’s first fiction feels a bit patchy, the best of
UnWorld marks a writer to watch.
Understands the assignment ... The story smoothly switches among four narrators...and their cumulative perspectives on Alex’s death click together with the satisfying pacing of a murder mystery ... Mr. Greene grounds the premise in knotty emotion and authentic humanity. Many scenes hold their own as realistic literary fiction ... Unworld also nails how once-alienating technology can swiftly become banal and even comfy ... Not everything in the novel works. The tidy ending hustles Anna into an overheated epiphany, and even though everyone in the book mourns Alex, the kid is tedious ... Yet Mr. Greene takes interesting risks that pay off more often than not.
