Tim Weed’s third novel, The Afterlife Project, follows Dr. Q and her team of scientists as they travel through a world devastated by climate change and illness, looking for any sign of a woman still able to reproduce, after a hyper-pandemic has caused infertility among most of the population. Meanwhile, former microbiologist Nick wakes up from a cryogenic sleep 10,000 years in the future to a different kind of earth: one with a blossoming ecosystem, but devoid of any human life. As he waits for the other cryogenic pod to reveal a fertile woman to restart humanity with, he must survive the loneliness of his new world, unsure if his former colleagues succeeded at finding anyone at all.

A novel that feels more relevant every day, The Afterlife Project masterfully explores the nuances of human identity in the face of societal collapse and rebirth. What begins as a typical sci-fi dilemma twists and turns into a daring adventure, a philosophical journey, and, most importantly of all, a love story.

Weed was kind enough to speak to me in the months leading up to his book’s release about his practice, process, and guiding principles.

 

—Teal Ivy Hall

 

Teal Ivy Hall: In your novel, most of humanity has lost the ability to procreate due to a hyper-pandemic that causes infertility. Obviously, the word “pandemic” has a different cultural connotation to us now than it did five years ago. Was the idea of including a hyper-pandemic and its consequences in this book shaped by COVID-19?

Tim Weed: I actually wrote a rough first draft of The Afterlife Project in fall of 2018, more than two years before COVID hit. Subsequent drafts may have been slightly affected by the experience of living through an actual global pandemic—though as you mention, the one recounted in the novel is considerably more devastating. Still, I don’t consider The Afterlife Project to be a “pandemic novel.” That’s just one aspect of the backstory that creates the extremely difficult conditions my characters find themselves in. 

The reality is, the danger of pandemic disease is something we’ve all been living with for a long time. And unfortunately, given our multi-pronged environmental crisis and the current policy environment in Washington, DC, the risk is almost certainly growing. 

 

TIH: The characters come upon a city that has fallen into disrepair from humanity’s decline. What I enjoyed most about this setting was the frequent descriptions of trash around the city’s environment. It was such a small detail that I haven’t seen often in speculative fiction, and it struck me as very human. In a world where so much apocalyptic and climate media exists, how did you want your fiction to differ from what’s already out there?

TW: My focus was less on trying to produce something different from anything else out there, and more on writing the most immersive and gripping novel I could. Something I’ve learned over time is that one of the crucial active ingredients of immersive fiction is vivid, specific, concrete, sensory detail. Another thing I’ve learned is that the more “far out” the story is—the more distant in time and place from the settings of contemporary daily life—the more important it is to ground it in the familiar. Sensory specificity and gritty realism are indispensable aspects of the kind of speculative fiction I like to read, and that I wanted to write. 

I would also say that there’s an inherent poignancy in the artifacts of a collapsed civilization. In the famous words of Joni Mitchell: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone.”

 

TIH: Nick goes on a spiritual journey throughout the novel, mentioning multiple times that he feels the animals in the ecosystem around him understand him on a deeper level than the animals that exist in our world today. What are your personal philosophies on how we, as humans, are connected to the world around us, and how did those shape your writing of this story?

TW: Great question. I think you’re getting to the core of what the novel is about, which of course almost automatically reflects my personal philosophy. As we confront the multi-pronged environmental crisis that has currently overtaken us, to paraphrase Marcia Bjornerud’s wonderful nonfiction book Timefulness: How Thinking Like a Geologist Can Help Save the World: It’s not the end of nature we’re looking at, but the end of the illusion that we’re not part of nature. That we weren’t birthed and embedded in the ebb and flow, the stew and ferment of life on this immense, complex, and very old planet. 

For me, this is a bracingly optimistic perspective, pointing the way to a future in which humans finally come to accept our destiny as the stewards, rather than the exploiters, of the other life forms with whom we share the Earth.

 

TIH: The novel has two main narrators, both with very distinct voices and who exist in different worlds. On a technical level, the sections are also written from different point-of-views, in different tenses, and with fairly different structures. What was your process for writing between these two perspectives?

TW: The dual narrative modes emerged early in the drafting process and were refined in revision. I found them useful in differentiating what are in effect two widely separated timelines, each with its own distinct narrative voice. (If you were being technical you could call one “third person limited omniscient” and the other “first person short retrospective,” taking the form of daily journal entries.) 

In terms of process, I drafted each story separately and kept them separate through a couple of early drafts. Then at a certain point I embarked on what I called a “braiding draft,” in order to better connect the timelines and make the transitions more natural and more suspenseful. After the “braiding draft” the separate timelines became part of an inseparable whole—and as you know, they do end up converging at the end of the book. 

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

 

TIH: You have a rich background in the geography, flora, and fauna of the world. You worked for National Geographic and other organizations for many years, leading educational travel programs all around the world, and much of your written work has a sense of the outdoors imbued into it. This knowledge bleeds into many of the characters of this novel, who are scientists trying to save their species from dying. What did your research look like for this book? What parts came from your lived experiences and what subjects required further investigation?

TW: As part of my work as a traveling lecturer for National Geographic Expeditions several years ago, I found myself aboard a small-ship cruise through Tierra del Fuego: from Ushuaia, Argentina to Cape Horn, north and west along the Beagle Channel and through the Straits of Magellan to Puntarenas, Chile. The Chilean-owned ship had a fleet of twelve zodiacs and a highly qualified expedition crew to deploy them twice daily for adventurous outings to islands, glaciers, sub-Antarctic forests, and penguin colonies. As luck would have it, there were also some fascinating fellow-passengers aboard the ship: a young paleoclimatologist from Princeton, a marine biologist who’d spent much of his career diving beneath the ice in the polar regions, and an astrophysicist who was the director of Hawaii’s Mauna Loa observatory. Needless to say, we had some fascinating conversations in the ship’s panoramic dining cabin. 

These conversations and the remote wilderness setting were the initial inspiration for The Afterlife Project, though the novel’s speculative framework is informed by further research into scientific topics such as quantum physics, paleoclimatology, geology, epidemiology, and evolutionary biology, and by the environmental issues that are of existential concern at this moment in human history: climate breakdown, habitat loss, mass extinction. My interest in addressing these topics in a work of fiction was partly aesthetic and partly for the sake of my own sanity. I thought it would be an interesting artistic challenge to take on these big questions in the context of a dramatic and readable epic novel, and as I’m sure is the case for many of us at this moment in history, I’d been brooding and worrying about the future. 

The process of dreaming up and composing the novel didn’t end after that Tierra del Fuego trip, however; that was really just the beginning. A big part of the setting was based on a natural location quite a bit closer to home—a local hilltop outlook with an expansive view of the mountains that stretch out in three directions, a place important enough to me that I still visit it on a weekly basis. This place seemed like a perfect aerie for a castaway stranded in an unimaginably vast wilderness: an elevated lookout above a vast forested topography. I started to imagine how things would look and feel to such a castaway in such a place. How he might assemble some kind of life there. How he might cope with the daily tasks of survival—not only physical, but emotional and psychic. 

The fact that it was in the company of scientists aboard an expeditionary ship in one of the remotest parts of the world that The Afterlife Project first sparked to life may help explain why its main protagonists are scientists, part of a team of researchers who in different ways set off on their own expeditions. 

 

TIH: At a glance, this novel is about the consequences of humanity’s effect on the Earth. However, I would argue that its most central theme is about how love endures through memory, regardless of the physical changes that occur in ourselves or the world around us. In a time when it feels like our world is hurtling closer and closer to the one your characters are trying to survive in this book, how do we stay focused on that idea of love?

TW: Thank you for that observation, and for the question! If you’re paying attention, it’s hard to avoid feelings of despair when you consider the challenges we face on this planet and as a species. But despair is a paralyzing emotion. I didn’t want to write a novel that wallows in despair, but rather one that celebrates what we have—and what we have to lose. I wanted to write a story that offered hope in the darkness, and that in some sense also pointed a way forward. 

I personally find hope by spending as much time as possible outdoors, in the forest and mountains and on or in the ocean, by seeking out community, by engaging in various forms of resistance, by occupying myself in absorbing practices of work and play, and by surrounding myself with friends and loved ones, because I agree with you. In the end, love is what truly matters, and what truly endures. Love of life, love of nature, love of other people and the better angels of the human spirit. And it seems to me that these thoughts must have been foremost in my mind as I wrote The Afterlife Project. 

 

---

TIM WEED is the author of four books of fiction including The Afterlife Project, which was named a best book of 2025 by Library Journal and the Toronto Star. His new novel, The Gatepost, releases in May 2026. He serves on the core faculty of the Newport MFA in Creative Writing and is the co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program. A former featured expert for National Geographic Expeditions, Tim spent the first part of his career directing international educational programs around the world. He lives in Vermont with three disobedient cats.  

---

TEAL IVY HALL is a New England area writer and sometimes artist. Her work has been featured in HAD, Necessary Fiction, and a few other publications, but mostly on her mother’s refrigerator.