Interested in humans, AI, and/or the fate of planet Earth? Then join us for a conversation with local Science Fiction author Debbie Urbanski, whose debut novel, After World, was voted one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Favorite Books of 2023 and one of the Los Angeles Times' Best Tech Books of 2023. 

“After an artificial superintelligence targets humanity with a sterilization virus, it invites the last people to have their ‘post-body’ lives preserved and uploaded to a new virtual world through the Digital Human Archive Project (DHAP). One ‘storyworker’ called ad39-393a-7fbc is tasked with converting the life and death of a young woman into an optimized narrative format, but as it synthesizes journals, transcripts and reference texts chronicling her harrowing experience of the Great Transition’s violent social collapse, it struggles to maintain the authorial distance that DHAP requires. This inventive love story is meticulously experimental with time and structure.” —Dana Dunham, Scientific American.