I’ve just finished the advanced copy of The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed, Kindle Edition.
This vast and profound novel braids two timelines: 2068 AD (after a hyper-pandemic renders most humans sterile and only “0.0001% of the global population still retains their fertility”) and the distant future ten millennia out. Eventually, the two lines merge at the 92% mark.
The first timeline follows the misadventure of the crew from a failed interstellar colonization project as they travel the world seeking fertile females to sustain the human species in the aftermath. It also weaves in a love story between two main characters: the brilliant quantum physicist Natalie Quist and microbiologist Nick Hindman. The Second timeline narrates a survival story of the time-traveled Nick, who wanders in the post-apocalyptic wilderness and searches for signs of fellow humans in extreme loneliness.
The greatest strength of this easy-to-follow fiction is its immersive cinematographic quality. Tim Weed has painted the dystopian future with vivid words, rich sensory details, and vibrant imagination. For instance, at the beginning of the story, when a dazed Nick crawled out of his Time Dilation Sphere and emerged from a tiny hole on the former lab site somewhere in New Hampshire, he was greeted by a rebound earth teeming with diverse floras and unexpected faunas such as flying squirrels. I was immediately transported into a lush jungle instead of today’s New England.
Similarly, the imagined ecological collapse on Earth was realistic and chilling. The following description is almost a documentary of Hurricane Helene's destruction in Asheville, NC. ". . . roofing tin tumbling demonically past in the rushing wind, the terrible sound of loudly splintering trees, and a strong tide flowing like a filthy, corpse-strewn river up the avenue in front of our house in Miramar. I remember the stink of it."
The unfolding of disasters is uncannily prophetical and propulsive. The team’s harrowing journey on the Mediterranean Sea is highly suspenseful, especially their close call in Alhambra with the hungry Spaniards, who had been reduced to barbaric, roaming bands hunting in deserts. Because I’d lived in the Boston area for a quarter of a century, the depicted image of a vast marshland burying everything except two familiar landmarks on high grounds (The DeCordova Sculpture Park in Lincoln and the Mormon church of Belmont) is too close to home. Hyperpandemics, mega-fires, and total society collapse. . . the idea that these catastrophes would happen in four decades sends shudders down my spine.
The only drawback of Tim’s lyrical writing is that it can be distracting. I find myself pausing from time to time to admire the beautifully crafted sentences and gorgeous prose.
Even though the subject matter is deadly serious, dry, dark humor strikes through. For instance, Dr. Nicolas Hindman is "the only human male we encountered post-collapse who's still capable of producing viable sperm." And, the surviving members of the Centauri Project plan to find the last few fertile females and convince them that “as a way of ensuring the survival of the species, it was their duty to colonize the deep future alongside Dr. Hindman."
Nick, the main character, is well-drawn in the flesh and blood. Yet, I cringe at his self-inflicted hardship when he forgot to mark his path, got lost, and had to sleep unprotected in the forest. Even a teenage boycott would possess more survival skills and fare better in similar circumstances. Maybe his incompetence was induced by his millennia-long time travel?
This story has many colorful minor characters to root for, such as the mischievous, happy-go-lucky Ptolemy Quist, who is a great sailor and marksman. (Maybe the irony is lost on me, but why would any American name his son with this antiquated Greek/Egyptian name?) The Icelandic sportswoman-turned-cult-leader, who fiercely protects her tiny chiefdom on an island off the coast of Sicily, is easy to visualize. Even a nameless man, who is desperate for a can of preserved peach and tries to bluff with his unloaded rifle, comes alive with only a few deft paragraphs.
The bleak future portrayed in the tale is particularly dreadful for foodies. The main protein in the year 2068 is “Lab jerky”: salt-brined tofu strips sprinkled with various spices and sun-dried to the approximate consistency of old cardboard. Similarly, in the distant 10th millennium, before Nick improves his hunting-gathering skills and successfully spears a squirrel, he subsisted on snails, crickets, and grasshoppers as his protein sources. On the bright side, the forest provided him abundant mushrooms and a “supply of powdered mushroom elixirs— lion’s mane, reishi, chaga— that serve as a substitute for previously imported coffees and teas.” Later still, the hallucinogenic type becomes an important tool in the search for potential surviving humanity.
More pearls of wisdom are scattered in this book than the glinting nuggets on a California hill before the Gold Rush. At one point, our hero mused, "... even the clearest truths can be twisted into lies that can be used to justify all manner of evil: tribalism, corruption, exploitation, violence. Maybe there’s something inevitable about this whole process, like a glitch built into the very DNA of the species."
(Spoiler Alert:
In fact, the surviving members of the Centauri Project resorted to unethical, if not criminal, methods to secure a young girl as their potential test subject, and, of course, they justified their tragic abduction with their noble cause: saving the Homo sapien from extinction.)
When civilizations are collapsing, any desperate action seems justifiable. Halfway through reading the scientists’ herculean endeavors to preserve the human species, I couldn't help wondering: why didn’t they try a much easier method--cloning human beings? After the famous sheep Dolly was cloned in 1996, only ethical, social, and religious constraints have prevented this from happening. So, what is there in an anarchic society to stop them? Perhaps tedious lab trials won't make a fantastic adventure story.
Hopefully, our current generations will heed this cautionary tale about humanity’s demise and slim hope. "So why not take solace in the truth that the planet is still a beautiful place? That nature, in some form, will inevitably outlive us? It seems possible, at times, to indulge in the fantasy that everything’s going to be okay. That a happy life is still possible. That one still might have a shot, for example, at growing old in the company of a loving partner, or even— because we’re talking pure fantasy now— surrounded by laughing children, who will in turn experience the happiness of preparing the ground for their own descendants and heirs.”