Public Access Afterworld is Jane Schoenbrun’s first novel: a sprawling, unsettling story about television, online obsession, identity and the danger of treating escape as a substitute for living.
Schoenbrun previously worked as a film critic before moving into writing and directing. Their work frequently explores trans identity, isolation, digital connection and the stories people use to understand themselves. This book extends those concerns beyond the limits of a camera, allowing its ideas to expand across decades, dimensions and a large ensemble cast.
Fans of We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, I Saw the TV Glow and Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma will recognise the recurring interests. The difference is scale. Public Access Afterworld is deliberately unwieldy, sometimes brilliant and occasionally frustrating, but its strange mixture of references and concepts remains distinctly Schoenbrun’s.
Two friends and a forbidden broadcast
The novel opens in 2009, when high-school students David Sawyer and Erin Morrison spend their free time watching television in Erin’s basement. David is in love with his best friend, while Erin is more interested in the final day of analogue broadcasting and a surreal programme she discovers on the airwaves.
Erin records Public Access Afterworld and becomes convinced that the programme is a gateway to somewhere beyond ordinary reality. David cannot make sense of what he sees, but he pretends to share her fascination rather than risk disappointing her. The gap between their experiences gradually damages their relationship.
After David posts the recording online, he finds a community of viewers with their own inexplicable connections to television. Together, they search for the source of the transmissions and try to determine what they signify.
A new life inside the machine
The story later shifts to 2026 and follows Bethany Peters, a trans woman living in an Austin transformed by technology companies and tech-industry culture. Her life with her perfectly adequate boyfriend has settled into a rut, so a new job at GlobalVill appears to offer a possible change.
GlobalVill is a video-sharing giant with clear similarities to YouTube. Bethany works as a content moderator, viewing an endless stream of material that ranges from dull and disposable to deeply disturbing. That work brings her into contact with Public Access Afterworld and the conspiracy surrounding it.
As Bethany investigates, she encounters people whose lives have been permanently altered by the programme. A condition known as screen sickness places her under increasing pressure, forcing her to accept a role in a conflict she never volunteered to join. The novel’s mystery becomes both an external conspiracy and a story about the stories people cannot stop pursuing.
When observation replaces living
Books give Schoenbrun room to imagine on a scale that film budgets and studio decisions cannot easily support. The result is a 600-page narrative that moves through different times and alternate dimensions, while bringing a cinematic sensibility to nearly every chapter.
Its central concerns will be familiar to returning readers: digital isolation, television as an imagined escape, and the impulse to analyse art instead of simply experiencing it. The characters are often so consumed by their obsessions that ordinary life becomes secondary. They chase a new job, a new relationship or the next signal, only to discover that fantasy can be as damaging as reality.
The book also knows when to puncture its own seriousness. A corporate villain interrupts a climactic moment through Microsoft Teams. One forum participant somehow knows the details of every Gossip Girl episode without having watched the show. Elsewhere, Bethany refuses to hear about a character’s sexual trauma because it is “too dark”. These comic interruptions make the novel stranger without removing its emotional weight.
Ambitious, funny and overextended
The novel’s biggest weakness is also one of its defining features. As more characters and ideas arrive, the breadth of the story begins to work against it. Schoenbrun’s economical, film-like prose keeps the plot moving, but it can leave the world feeling less textured than its premise deserves.
Some ideas are explained so directly that the book occasionally resembles a thought experiment. Film can place a meaningful image in front of an audience and allow the viewer to make the connection independently. Here, the prose sometimes states the meaning repeatedly instead.
Even so, Public Access Afterworld is an essential read for anyone interested in Schoenbrun’s developing body of work. The novel is planned as a trilogy and was once envisioned as an HBO series. Its largest set pieces may never reach a screen, but the book’s scale gives readers the freedom to imagine them.
For more stories about games, technology and the culture around interactive entertainment, visit the RETROCADE Arcade Blog. If this book’s analogue signals and screen obsession inspire a hardware project, the Arcade Machine Buying Guide can help with the practical choices, while arcade machines offer a more tangible way to bring screen-based entertainment into a room.
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