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.
If AI fascination hasn’t succumbed to AI fatigue, then Jayson Greene’s new novel UnWorld arrives at a good time: It’s a lightly speculative story where intelligence may be artificial, but emotions are painfully real ... UnWorld is Greene’s first novel and his second book; his debut memoir, Once More We Saw Stars. chronicled the loss of his first child. UnWorld also concerns grieving parents, but it’s not a fictional version of the author’s own experience: It’s an ambitious but flawed novel about grief, identity, and the possibility of knowing another person’s mind ... In magical realist or lightly fantastical stories, writers often portray something very much like our world, just tweaked with a single metaphorically loaded impossibility. Greene’s novel doesn’t work like that, but perhaps it would be better if it did ... The world-building here is distractingly thin. Artificial intelligence has, apparently, transformed Greene’s world, but the unnamed town of this novel’s future bears an eerie resemblance to Anytown, USA, circa 2025. 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: Here is a mind run away with itself ... 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.
