Book Review: ‘The Afterlife Project,’ Tim Weed

The big challenge for authors of climate fiction — often snappily shortened to “cli-fi” — is that environmental collapse doesn’t lend itself to inspiring stories. Early in Tim Weed’s new novel, The Afterlife Project, the author delivers a précis of the 21st century that could come straight from your daily doomscrolling:

Bills coming due for those heady decades of optimism and affluence and devil-may-care consumption built on fossil fuels. Deadly weather, raging wildfires, melting icecaps, acidifying oceans. Drought and famine, dislocation and war, fracturing societies, mushrooming authoritarianism.

Sounds like a cheery tale to see you off to bed, right? Not quite. But The Afterlife Project, short-listed for the 2023 Prism Prize for Climate Literature, is no slog, either. In his third work of fiction, Putney author Weed sidesteps both The Road-style grimness and the preachiness of many more “upbeat” cli-fi works. He’s crafted a dark yet hopeful story that is engrossing enough to be a beach read, if descriptions of reshaped coastlines and dead oceans don’t put you off.

In creating his near-future setting, Weed takes a page from P.D. James’ novel The Children of Men (source of Alfonso Cuarón’s film). In the 2040s, we learn early in The Afterlife Project, the release of Arctic methane turbo-charged global warming. Humanity’s efforts to save itself via technology backfired spectacularly, resulting in a “hyperpandemic” that killed most of the population and rendered nearly all the rest sterile.

Game over for the human race, right? Not according to Dr. Natalie Quist, genius scion of a tech billionaire, who has invented a “Time Dilation Sphere” with the power to transport a few people into the distant future. There she hopes they will be able to reseed Homo sapiens on a restored Earth and “give our species a chance to get it right this time.”

The trick is finding subjects who can still reproduce — such as Natalie’s boyfriend, Nicholas Hindman, whose research work in extreme environments conferred immunity to the plague. As the novel opens, Nick emerges from the Time Dilation Sphere to find himself 10,000 years in the future — and completely alone. Natalie’s quest to find a fertile Eve for his Adam appears to have failed.

The Afterlife Project is actually two stories, unfolding in alternating chapters. In one narrative thread, long after the collapse of civilization, Nick explores his surroundings in the former New Hampshire, survives as a hunter-gatherer and makes jaunts into the wilderness in hopes of finding an enduring human population. In the other thread, back in 2068, Natalie and a small crew set off on a voyage across the Atlantic in a vintage sloop. Their goal: to locate a fertile mate for Nick on the volcanic Italian island of Stromboli.

While the Nick chapters are in third person, Weed frames the 2068 sections as a found narrative: the journal of Alejandra Morgan-Ochoa, one of Natalie’s crew. A personable narrator, with just the right blend of idealism and acerbic relatability (“I would trade a few gold bars for a café Cubano or a hot chai with fresh cow milk,” she laments of post-collapse conditions), Alejandra doesn’t let the decline of humanity stop her from appreciating sunsets — or falling in love.

Weed draws on his experience as an international travel guide and cofounder of the Cuba Writers Program to depict this voyage with a richness of detail that makes it thoroughly plausible. The scientists’ last-ditch mission soon becomes a rip-roaring adventure, albeit one overshadowed by the enormous stakes of their endeavor. Weed keeps readers on the edge of their seats as we wait to discover whether, in Alejandra’s words, “this voyage in the twilight of humanity’s dominion on this ailing planet has been a fool’s errand or, as we hope, an inspired roll of the dice.”

Nick’s narrative is necessarily less eventful than Alejandra’s. As if living out a doomsday version of the kids’ classic My Side of the Mountain, he forages, hikes, redomesticates some domestic cats (clearly the evolutionary winners), and uses magic mushrooms to hallucinate companionship and meaning into his solitary existence. Convinced he’s the last person on Earth, he wonders with mounting urgency whether life is worth living when the whole “treasure trove” of human civilization persists “only in the dwindling memory of one pitifully inadequate mind.”

A story of one guy woolgathering in the woods might not sound riveting, but Weed finds ways to keep our attention. Nick’s reflections yield passages of almost unbearable poignancy, whether he’s savoring the teeming life of a virgin forest or encountering all-but-effaced traces of the human footprint. (Boston? Mostly gone. Burlington? Totally.)

Remembering a trip to Dinosaur National Monument as a child, when he first sensed the “otherworldly vastness of geological time,” Nick reminisces about a vanished world in which humanity’s own extinction was already foreshadowed:

From Dinosaur they drove west, into the heart of fossil gas extraction country, stopping for another picnic dinner at a highway pullout: cheddar cheese, summer sausage, and more of those improbably fat blueberries. Light and shadow; the golden-red dusk still hazy from the forest fires; the tall orange flames of the flaring wells like monumental torches arranged across the desert landscape.

In such passages, Weed reminds us why cli-fi matters: The tools of fiction, including elegiac literary prose, empower him to push past numbing statistics and bring home the impact of environmental crisis on the individual.

Granted, addressing real issues with the free hand of a novelist can also have its drawbacks. If you’re a connoisseur of collapse-of-civilization stories, you know they often have a way of evolving (or devolving) into Garden of Eden fantasies in which a middle-aged protagonist discovers it’s his duty to breed with a nubile young survivor. Early on, Weed teases us with a scene in which Nick dreams of his Eve emerging from her own Time Dilation Sphere, working every purple cliché of such fiction (“Suddenly they’re holding each other, the generous breasts beneath her deerskin tunic flattening into his chest.”)

While I won’t spoil later developments, you can rest assured that Weed knows exactly what he’s doing, and The Afterlife Project is not that kind of fantasy. For this author, the antidote to despair is not wishful thinking about undoing original sin and returning to a Rousseauean state of nature. On the contrary, the novel’s central characters — Nick, Alejandra, Natalie — find their strength in a quantum vision of time, in which the past is never past and every effort matters, no matter how seemingly futile.

We still lack a word for the peculiar anticipatory nostalgia of stories about the end of the human race — stories that no one should be left to tell. If you were moved by Flow, this year’s Oscar-winning animation about a cat adrift in a post-human world, The Afterlife Project will likewise wrest tears from you. As Nick experiences the verdancy of a reborn Earth, he realizes that “nature will find a way,” with or without human agency. The sentiment that rang so ominously in Jurassic Park (“Life finds a way”) reads here as a noble affirmation of hope against despair.

This article appears in The Animal Issue 2025.

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