Feature: The Infinity Courts Series by Akemi Dawn Bowman

I have been shouting about the Infinity Courts series since The Infinity Courts came out in 2021. Akemi Dawn Bowman built a world where Nami Miyamoto dies and wakes up in an AI controlled afterlife run by Ophelia, a virtual assistant not unlike the ones we were all already talking to on our phones. Ophelia decided humans were not conscious enough to deserve autonomy and enslaved them. Nami joins the rebellion. I loved it immediately.

The Afterlands, the third and final book, is out now. And I keep thinking about the fact that Akemi was writing this whole series before any of us were having the conversations we are having now.

She was writing about AI deciding it knew better than humans before ChatGPT. Before generative AI started flooding creative platforms. The questions Akemi asked were important, but they feel even closer now.

Writers and illustrators have watched their work scraped without consent, their styles replicated, their livelihoods threatened. The conversation is not particularly interested in nuance, which makes sense. When something feels like an existential threat to the thing you love, nuance is a hard sell. Plus art is a form of resistance, which we need even more now.

The Infinity Courts series asked deeper questions. Who gets to decide which kind of intelligence has value? What happens when the thing we built to serve us decides it knows better? Akemi does not hand you clean answers. She builds a world where you have to sit with the discomfort of not having them.

That is what I keep coming back to. Not a verdict on AI but the fact that a YA series was asking these questions years before most of us had to. If you slept on this series, the final book being out is a good reason to pick it up!

The Afterlands (The Infinity Courts, #3)

by Akemi Dawn Bowman
Published by: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
on April 16, 2026
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Goodreads

Nami must race against time to save Infinity—and humanity—in the explosive third and final book in the “cerebral and pulse-pounding” (School Library Journal on Infinity Courts, starred review) Infinity Courts series from critically acclaimed author Akemi Dawn Bowman.
Infinity has changed. Victory and Famine lie in ruins, while Ozias—previously the leader of the fight against the AI Residents who subjugated humans—has overthrown Death. And the boy that Nami unreservedly gave her heart to has been dragged back to the Capital to have his memory erased. In a shifting landscape of alliances, Nami doesn’t know who she can trust—she only knows it’s her mistakes that have driven them to today.
With few allies and even fewer friends, Nami sets off one final time to prove that a bridge between humans and Residents really is possible…before the shadows of the past destroy any chance of a better future.