The year is 10151. For the last ten thousand years, Nick Hindman—a microbiologist and member of the prestigious research team the Centauri Project—slept in a state of cryogenic suspension as a quantum-powered system originally designed for interstellar travel propelled him forward through the millennia, a test subject for an emergency project to secure the survival of the human species by colonizing not the stars, but a deep future Earth. His protocol? 1) Survive. 2) Find if there are any other humans left alive. 3) Hope against hope for the arrival of a second test subject, a female.
Featuring a plausible mechanism for one-way time travel, a voyage across the post-apocalyptic seas, and lovers separated by ten thousand years, The Afterlife Project is a meditation on the future of humanity and the natural world we have unbalanced, the true meaning of deep time, and the possibility of hope in the darkness.
Dark fiction is good for you.
One of the things fiction does better than any other art form is to allow us to vividly experience the world through a consciousness not our own, imagining alternative lives and alternative futures—sometimes very dark ones—from the relative safety of our favorite reading nook.
Dark fiction isn’t for everyone, but if you like it—if you’re drawn to the writing of Stephen King, for example, or Shirley Jackson or Margaret Atwood or our own Chuck Wendig—then it’s possible that you’re the kind of reader for whom the horrific offers a particular kind of reading pleasure.
Because let’s face it: there’s power in darkness. It’s an essential source of narrative drive for one thing—what keeps the pages turning—and it’s also a healthy response to personal stress and the ongoing shit-show of current events.
Putting ourselves in the position of fictional characters as they confront tense and difficult challenges, then processing those experiences and the emotions they evoke into wisdom or at least working theories about life, is a cathartic, healthy, uniquely human practice. “We need to play out our fears within the safe confines of the imaginary,” wrote Ian McEwan, “as a form of hopeful exorcism.”
Life on this planet is going to be okay in the long run. But humanity? Well . . .
if there’s one piece of wisdom I’ve taken away from researching and writing The Afterlife Project, it’s that we’re not facing the end of the amazing, ever-evolving panoply of life on Earth. Far from it. Rather, we are—or should be—facing the end of the illusion that the human species is not part of nature. That we haven’t from our very emergence as a species been embedded in the ebb and flow, the stew and ferment, of this complex and beautiful 4.5 billion year-old planet. The widespread adoption of this way of thinking would be a timely and necessary paradigm shift. Because it’s still not too late to save ourselves.
One-way time travel into the deep future isn’t all that far-fetched.
Part of the inspiration for The Afterlife Project was a conversation I had with an eminent astrophysicist in Tierra del Fuego (it’s a long story) who was kind enough to give me his opinion on the plausibility of one-way time travel into the deep future. Using quantum physics and a series of complex mathematical equations scribbled on napkins, he was able to theorize a mechanism based on existing or easily foreseeable technology to send a test subject 10,000 years into the future.
There are good reasons we should want to explore this option—for example to facilitate the kind of interstellar travel that would us to colonize the nearest viable exoplanet, or, as in the case of the team of scientists in The Afterlife Project, to colonize a deep future Earth after the current iteration of humanity has done its worst.
Time’s a river, not an arrow
Time doesn’t actually exist in the way we perceive it. It’s not an arrow, it’s a river. This is mathematically proven.
The water in the river of time does flow downstream, but if you were to trace the river back upstream a few miles you would find the same water flowing between the same banks—so in a certain sense all the moments that have ever passed are still unfolding.
Because of the way it feels for us to live in our aging bodies, it’s almost impossible for us to to accept this truth intuitively, but rest assured: it’s one of the fundamental precepts of physics.
Forget about the market. You really do have to write what’s in your heart.
I know you’ve heard this before, but you really need to listen. I know novelists who haven’t listened, and it never ends well.
I mean it’s okay to think about the market before you start, and you’ll need to think about it eventually if you want to pitch and sell it, but don’t focus on the market when you’re writing!
I wrote a weird, dark novel. I didn’t set out to make it that way, it just happened. It turned out to be one of those books that felt like it was being dictated from on high, though, and when a story feels like that—when it starts to tell itself like this one did, you just ride the wave and hope for the best. As a well-known Mexican novelist and filmmaker recently reminded me, you’re writing for your own particular “species.” You just have to trust that there are other members of that species out there, and that they will find your book.
Learn about the market, of course; study it and understand your genres. But if you try to write purely for the market, the muse will turn her back.
Tim Weed is the author of three books of fiction. His work has won or been shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award, the Writer’s Digest Annual Fiction Awards, the Tobias Wolff Award for Fiction, the Fish International Short Story Award, the New Rivers Many Voices Project, and many others. Co-founder of the Cuba Writers Program, Tim is on the core faculty of the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. His new novel, The Afterlife Project, was a finalist for the Prism Prize in Climate Literature and Uncharted magazine’s Novel Excerpt Award.
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HJ says:
I will be reading this one. Thanks!
June 7, 2025 — 7:42 AM