TIM WEED, AUTHOR OF THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT • Interviews

Interview by Andrea Caswell
TIM WEED, AUTHOR OF THE AFTERLIFE PROJECT (Podium Publishing)

In The Afterlife Project, award-winning author Tim Weed imagines multiple compelling futures: one set in 2068, as a team of scientists races to save humanity from extinction, and one set in Earth’s deep future, where biologist Nicholas Hindman is marooned on a deserted but evolving planet. In this interview with Senior Fiction Editor Andrea Caswell, Weed discusses the genesis of his idea for the novel, how he handled writing multiple narrative timelines at once, and why fiction remains important to our human experience of the world.

“One reason fiction retains its vitality as an art form is that it enables readers to experience the world from within a consciousness that’s not their own.”

Andrea Caswell: How did The Afterlife Project begin for you? Was it a conversation, a “crazy idea,” or a concept you’d been thinking about for some time?

Tim Weed: All of the above! As a traveling lecturer for National Geographic Expeditions on a small-ship cruise through Tierra del Fuego, I met some interesting fellow passengers, including an astrophysicist at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa Observatory, and a young paleo-climatologist from Princeton. At the time, I was casting around for a new fiction project. Though I’d published a novel and a short story collection, I wanted to write another novel and was looking for subject matter that was bigger: topics like geological time, the climate crisis, the biodiversity crisis, and the potentially clouded future of the human species itself. I thought it would be an interesting challenge to take on these big questions in the context of a novel.

So I knew more or less what I wanted the novel to be about, but I hadn’t really figured out how to write it. Then suddenly, in the middle of a casual dinner-table conversation—with the vast unpopulated wilderness landscape of Tierra del Fuego sliding by outside the ship’s picture windows—an idea came to me. I asked the astrophysicist about the plausibility of one-way time travel into the deep future. He took on the thought exercise with gusto, and in a series of complex equations involving general relativity and quantum physics scribbled on napkins, he was able to demonstrate (to his satisfaction at least) a mechanism for one-way time-travel 10,000 years into the future that was theoretically possible using technology easily imaginable or currently in development for interstellar travel.

I had permission to run. It would take a lot of research, a lot of imaginative work, and numerous full drafts, but the novel that would eventually become The Afterlife Project was on its way.

Andrea: Early in the novel, you refer to Earth as “this beautiful, stricken planet.” How did that image help shape your vision for the book?

Tim: The book’s speculative framework is informed by a vision of the entire planet as a living organism, recalling the “Gaia Hypothesis” put forward in the 1970s, as well as by the multi-pronged environmental crisis afflicting that organism right now, which is of existential concern to humanity.

I wanted to write an adventure story that would be exciting and immersive for readers. One of the reasons fiction retains its vitality as an art form is that it enables readers to experience the world from within a consciousness that’s not their own. Imagining alternate lives and alternative futures—sometimes very dark ones—from the relative safety and comfort of your favorite reading chair, and putting yourself in the position of fictional characters as they confront challenges, and then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom, or at least working theories about life—that’s what fiction is all about. The act of reading fiction is a cathartic, healthy, and uniquely human practice.

Andrea: The novel uses two timelines, one in the near-future and one in a deep future ten thousand years hence. Why did you select those particular timelines?

Tim: I chose ten millennia on for the deep future timeline because 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 has been 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, this was also the time frame that my astrophysicist friend used in his calculations, and for purposes of plausibility and research integrity, I wanted to stick at least somewhat closely to his original math. Ten thousand years is also convenient in that it’s far enough into the future that Earth’s ecosystems could plausibly be in recovery after peak greenhouse gas concentrations have begun the long process of weathering out of the system.

The near future timeline (2068) was a scenario I extrapolated from the timeline all of us are currently living. I needed to show the more recent aftermath of climate and epidemiological catastrophe in order to make the stakes clearer for my cast of characters—and also because I’m a fan of post-apocalyptic literature, and I wanted to try my hand at that kind of world-building.

“Writing this book, I was casting myself as an archaeologist of the deep future looking back on our own time.”

Andrea: The narrative structuring of time can be such a challenge in writing, and you manage these two timelines beautifully. Once you knew which eras you’d work with, how did you develop a structure to handle them?

Tim: Thanks. I wrote them each separately, like two distinct novellas. When I was more or less satisfied with each timeline’s basic arc, I brought them together in what I called a “braiding draft,” focusing on connecting the timelines and making the transitions more natural and suspenseful.

I like having two alternating timelines because you can play them off each other in ways that can help sustain and even increase narrative momentum. Having clearly defined points of view was also useful in keeping track of vantage points available to each of the characters, and those alternating narrative voices helped (I hope) to keep things fresh.

Andrea: The main character, biologist Nicholas Hindman, walks an Earth both ravaged by and freed from human intervention. He recognizes his leap into the future as “a nearly inconceivable timespan on the scale of one human life, though barely the blink of an eye geologically speaking.” Time—as a construct, as a constant—is a recurrent theme in the book. What do you hope readers will take away from this aspect of the story?

Tim: Time is such a mysterious, uncanny, melancholy, and (for me, at least) irresistibly fascinating topic. The Afterlife Project is in part a novel about time travel, so it makes sense that time would emerge as an important theme.

On the one hand you have deep or geologic time, which is a mind-bending topic, scary, unimaginably vast, and also in some way, weirdly reassuring to contemplate. One of the geologists I read while researching the novel compared our understanding of time to the average medieval person’s understanding of geography; take a look at a world map made in the Middle Ages, and you’ll get an idea of what I mean. If you’re interested in going a bit deeper, I wrote a booklist for Literary Hub on the subject of deep time, with some of the books I consulted in my research.

In The Afterlife Project you also have time as a high-level physicist might see it—not an arrow but a river, as one of the characters puts it. This overlaps with a more mystical or spiritual way of looking at time, which I also find fascinating. So at different moments in the novel, characters consider time from some of these angles, and it becomes a recurring theme. I didn’t end up with any closure on this, any kind of pat takeaway about the actual true nature of time, and I suppose that’s a good thing, right? Because literature is supposed to ask questions rather than answer them.

“Literature is supposed to ask questions rather than answer them.”

Andrea: In his search for surviving humans, Dr. Hindman traverses long stretches of once-inhabited land. During one trek, he lands in the Sculpture Garden at the deCordova Museum in Lincoln, Mass., where he finds a portion of a massive marble sculpture. I loved that moment because it gave me the sense that art will endure. Could you speak more to that idea?

Tim: I love artifacts and have always been a fan of archaeology. I suppose it’s related to my fascination with deep time—the way that artifacts are like messages sent down through the years, and the way they seem to take on something of the essences of the people who created or handled or appreciated or worshipped them. I don’t know, it’s just something I find moving and endlessly fascinating. In a sense, writing this book, I was casting myself as an archaeologist of the deep future looking back on our own time.

Andrea: To write fiction, it’s often necessary to do research to bring our ideas to life. I imagine that’s especially true when writing science fiction. Where did you start? Was the research motivating, daunting, a fancy form of procrastination, or a combination of those?

Tim: I’ve written historical fiction, which also requires a great deal of research, so a book like this wasn’t too much of an adjustment. In fact, when I was writing The Afterlife Project, I wasn’t consciously thinking of it as science fiction—or at least I wasn’t articulating it to myself that way. As far as I was concerned at the time, I was writing a speculative adventure story that entailed scientific research. Which is kind of what science fiction is, right?

I love research, but yes, it can easily slide into procrastination. You have to resist that temptation. My approach is to do just enough research to understand where the subject is taking me and/or where I want to go with it. Then I write a full draft, which of course helps me pinpoint all the additional research I need to do in order to bring the story vividly to life.

Andrea: A location in the book’s scientific project was revered in part due to the famous Roberto Rossellini film of 1950, Stromboli, Land of God. Its inclusion created a wonderful intersection of art and science and of art and “reality” as portrayed in the book. Do you encourage writers to incorporate other artforms into their work?

Tim: I watched that film as part of the research for the novel, and it’s a great movie. The note about the footage being taken during a real volcanic eruption on Stromboli is absolutely true. I love it when artworks feature in fiction, particularly if the reader remembers them or has a chance to experience them separately from a book, because it can add extra dimensionality to the story. Novels are a wonderful art form because everyone experiences them in their own very personal way. If works of art created in other media can contribute to that experience, that’s an extra beautiful thing!

Andrea: The Afterlife Project was shortlisted for the Prism Prize for Climate Literature. Congratulations! Have you always been a reader of “climate fiction,” and if so, what are some of your favorite books in the genre?

Tim: Thank you! I’m obviously very happy about that. The book also received a starred review from Library Journal and was a New Scientist best new science fiction book of the month pick. It means a great deal to receive these kinds of official accolades on a creative project that one worked on in private for so long, often plagued by worry and doubt.

For me the greatest in climate fiction remains Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic masterpiece, The Road. It gives readers the experience of environmental catastrophe in purely emotional terms. It’s a frightening story and an extremely dark story, not just due to what happens, but literally dark, with a nameless father and son traveling a world so dead and barren that it’s absolutely devoid of color. It’s kind of like watching an old art-house horror movie in black and white, like The Night of the Living Dead. And then on the last page, this passage:

“Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”

To me, this is one of the great paragraphs in literature. It stands out because it’s so different than the rest of The Road. It’s not written in the same dead, ash-grey color scheme; it’s full of color and of life and of smell and touch and sound, and for me, the message of the novel is clear. This is The Road we as a species are on, but we still have a chance to avoid that future. We still have that trout stream.

Tim Weed is the author of The Afterlife Project (Podium Publishing, June 3, 2025) and two previous books of fiction. A former international travel guide, he serves on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing and is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program. Tim is the winner of several Writer’s Digest Popular Fiction Awards, and his work has appeared in Literary Hub, The Millions, The Writer’s Chronicle, Talking Points Memo, and elsewhere. He divides his time between rural Vermont and the island of Nantucket. Read more on his website.

Andrea Caswell holds an MFA in fiction and nonfiction from the Bennington Writing Seminars. She’s Senior Fiction Editor at Cleaver Magazine and is on the faculty of the Cleaver Workshops. She runs Cleaver’s Short Story Clinic, offering revision feedback on fiction up to 5000 words. Andrea’s work appears or is forthcoming in Tampa Review, The Coachella Review, River Teeth, The Normal School, Atticus Review, Columbia Journal, and others. She’s an alum of the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. For more information, please visit www.andreacaswell.com.