Some people have suggested that the only way mankind can survive is if we populate Mars. But with our sun only estimated to last another 5 billion years, moving to a neighboring planet will only delay the inevitable.
In Tim Weed’s science fiction novel The Afterlife Project (paperback, Kindle, audiobook), scientists hope to save humanity by sending someone into the far future. And that’s just part of their plan.
In the following email interview, Weed talks about what inspired and influenced this sci-fi story.
To begin, what is The Afterlife Project about, and when and where does it take place?
It’s a quest story, essentially.
Using technology originally developed for interstellar travel, a team of scientists sends a lone test subject into the deep future, where his job is to find any members of his own species that might have survived.
In the earlier timeline, the remaining scientists sail across the Atlantic Ocean in a solar-powered yacht to a small, volcanic island north of Sicily rumored to harbor something they thought no longer existed: a female subject capable of getting pregnant, who they can also send to the deep future as insurance that this generation of humans isn’t the last.
There is also a kind of impossible love story conducted across the chasm of 10,000 years.
Where did you get the idea for The Afterlife Project?
I was working as a featured lecturer for National Geographic on a small-ship cruise around Cape Horn and through Tierra del Fuego: The Beagle Passage, Straits of Magellan, etc. We had a great crew of people, including some fascinating scientists: an astrophysicist who was the director of the Mauna Loa observatory, and a young paleo-climatologist from Princeton. We had some fun conversations in the ship’s panoramic dining cabin, about things like quantum physics, time travel, the geological past, and possibilities for the Earth’s future.
I’d been wanting to write a novel with a large-scale outlook, informed by topics like geological time, mass extinction, climate change, what the future holds for the human species, etc., and suddenly I got the idea for a new novel about time travel into the deep future. I was so fortunate to have these resources close at hand; I spent the next few days shooting ideas back and forth with the astrophysicist, who was able to demonstrate through a complex equation involving quantum physics how one-way time travel into the future was theoretically possible using technology currently in development for interstellar travel.
I asked the paleo-climatologist what the Earth’s climate might look like in 10,000 years, and he told me that levels of greenhouse gases would almost certainly be in the early stages of a trajectory of recovery from our impending climate catastrophe by then, on a long descent back to pre-industrial norms.
Meanwhile, the whole time, there was this incredible landscape sliding by outside the ship’s picture windows: the glaciated mountain ranges and subantarctic beech forests of what is one of the greatest wilderness areas on the planet. Every day we’d stop for zodiac landings at glaciers, remote islands, and penguin colonies, so it was quite an adventure in its own right. But that’s how The Afterlife Project was inspired, and the moment when it first began to gain momentum.
So, is there a reason the scientists sent someone 10,000 years into the future as opposed to 1,000 or, conversely, 100,000?
It’s the approximate time frame it would take to send a craft traveling just under the speed of light to the nearest “goldilocks” exoplanet to Earth, which is located in the Proxima Centauri system. In the world of the story, the technology for one-way time travel was developed with an eye to interstellar colonization, but that dream evaporates in the wake of humanity’s existential crisis, and the mechanism is put to another use.
Not coincidentally, it was the time frame that my astrophysicist friend used in his calculations, and for purposes of plausibility and research integrity I wanted to stay at least somewhat closely to his original math.
Also, 10,000 years is convenient in that I wanted that part of the story unfold far enough into the future that the earth’s ecosystems could plausibly be in recovery after peak greenhouse gas concentrations had begun the long process of weathering out of the system.
The Afterlife Project is obviously a science fiction story, though I’ve also seen it called a work of climate fiction, an adventure story, and post-apocalyptic sci-fi.
It’s funny, when I was writing it I wasn’t even consciously thinking of it as science fiction — or at least I wasn’t articulating it to myself that way. It may be because as a writer I come from a more “mimetic realist” or “literary” background, but as far as I was concerned at the time I was writing a speculative adventure story that involved a lot of scientific research. But that’s kind of what science fiction is, right? So I really have no idea what I was thinking.
Now, The Afterlife Project is your second novel after Will Poole’s Island, though you also have a collection of your short stories called A Field Guide To Murder And Fly Fishing. Are there any authors, or specific stories, that had a big influence on Afterlife but not on anything else you’ve written?
I was inspired in part by novels such as Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, Richard Powers’ The Overstory, and Tolkien’s The Lord Of The Rings. Some of these books undoubtedly influenced my previous fiction as well, but for this novel they offered specific lessons about approach and technique that undoubtedly exerted an influence.
The Afterlife Project was also directly inspired by a number of nonfiction books that deal with deep time: the history of the planet, geological time, the five mass extinctions the planet has already undergone, and speculations about how the future would unfold were humanity to disappear from the planet. These are actually some very fascinating books, all of which I highly recommend. Here’s a link to that book list.
How about such non-literary influences as movies, TV shows, or games? Was The Afterlife Project influenced by any of those things?
In terms of influence, film and TV weren’t as important as other books, but my guess is that movies like Interstellar, Contact, and Arrival sort of gave me permission to pursue a story foregrounding the kind of “big” ambitious topics I was interested in, like space-time, general relativity, and the future of humanity, while TV series like Battlestar Galactica reminded me that when the survival of the human species is an open question, it can generate high stakes and robust dramatic tension. And the popularity of the great nature documentaries, like Planet Earth, showed that the awesome spectacles of life on Earth could be intrinsically riveting for mass audiences.
Sci-fi novels like The Afterlife Project are sometimes stand-alone stories and sometimes they’re the first step into a larger universe. What is Afterlife?
It was written as a stand-alone. However, I do have ideas for a sequel, and I’m seriously considering it.
Do you know yet what the other book will be called or when it might be out?
Not yet. I tend not to title a book until I’ve got at least one full draft, sometimes more.
Earlier I asked if The Afterlife Project had been influenced by any movies, TV shows, or games. But to flip things around, do you think Afterlife could work as a movie, TV show, or game?
I think it could work as a movie or a limited series on TV. A limited series would be the best format, I think, as it seems well-suited to the scope and dramatic structure of a novel. Some of the best limited series I’ve seen are novel adaptations, such as3 Body Problem and Dark Matter for sci-fi, and Big Little Lies or The Night Manager for mainstream / thriller stories.
So, if someone wanted to make a TV show based on The Afterlife Project, who would you want them to cast as the main characters?
Fun question! Here are my ideal casting choices:
[Loki‘s] Tom Hiddleston for Dr. Nicholas Hindman: a scientist at heart, does well with solitude and wilderness adventure. Sometimes prone to melancholy loneliness and increasingly wild flights of fancy.
[Parks And Recreation‘s] Aubrey Plaza for Dr. Alejandra Morgan-Ochoa: competent, beautiful, but sharp-tongued and sometimes fairly salty.
For Dr. Natalie Quist: one of the great minds of her generation. Refined but tough, and capable of seeing the good in any situation. So, Charlotte Rampling [Dexter], or maybe Olivia Colman [Fleabag].
And for Tollie Quist, the ne’er-d-well, aging scion of wealth, irreverent and irresponsible but good-hearted and self-sacrificing in the end, [Game Of Thrones‘] Sean Bean or [Iron Man‘s] Robert Downey, Jr.
So, is there anything else you think potential readers need to know about The Afterlife Project?
It’s being reviewed as climate fiction, with many reviewers writing about how it’s “important” or contains lessons that we need to learn. I do think the climate crisis is really the central existential issue for humanity, something that we’re all dealing with every day already, and will be for the rest of our lives.
But while climate catastrophe is part of the background, I don’t think this novel or any novel can serve primarily as a cautionary warning, or an instruction manual, or an attempt to change the mind of climate denialists. The Afterlife Project is (I hope) an immersive speculative adventure story about love, time travel, with rescuing the human species from itself. Among its themes are the nature of time itself and the long-term future of both humanity and planet Earth.
Finally, if someone enjoys The Afterlife Project, what sci-fi novel or novella of someone else’s would you suggest they check out next?
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road is an obvious choice, and if you haven’t read it yet, you really must. The Afterlife Project isn’t quite so dark as The Road, though.
Also, Peter Heller’s The Dog Stars and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven are two contemporary post-apocalyptic novels that I think are in a similar vein, in that while they present terrifying futures for humanity, there are legitimate grounds for optimism.
