Unworld by Jayson Greene is a deeply resonant exploration of grief, personhood, and the fragile boundary between flesh and firmware. In a near-future where human consciousness can be echoed in AI "uploads," the novel intertwines four perspectives: Anna, a mother shattered by her son’s mysterious death; Samantha, the lone witness to his final moments; Cathy, an AI scholar haunted by addiction; and Aviva, Anna’s digital double wrestling for autonomy. As their lives converge around love, loss, and the question of what makes us real, Greene meditates on memory’s malleability, and whether comfort engineered in code can ever match the messy truth of human emotion. Poetic, philosophical, and heartbreakingly intimate, Unworld asks whether true healing comes from technology... or from embracing our own sorrow.
