Interview with Keith McWalter, author of Lifers

Today it gives the Speculative Fiction Showcase great pleasure to interview Keith McWalter, whose novel Lifers has its debut on October 15, 2024.

What prompted you to write about a near-future in which longevity – and immortality - becomes common?

As I’ve grown older, I’ve naturally become more preoccupied with the idea of living a long and healthy life, and I’ve read widely in nonfiction accounts of longevity science and its practical applications.

Two things struck me about most discussions of longevity enhancement: increased longevity tends to be viewed as a luxury product for the rich and the few; and no one discusses the economic and social stresses that a radically longer (even if healthy) lifespan would impose on individuals, on families, and on society at large.

I wrote Lifers to dramatize those unspoken implications, and to examine ageism from a different perspective in which extreme longevity becomes commonplace and there are so many super-aged individuals that they become a problem – and a force – that must be reckoned with.

Who are the “Lifers” of the title?

“Lifers” is a colloquialism that comes into use in the mid-twenty-first century, referring to the first generation to show signs of infection with an engineered longevity protein called the “Methuselah genome.” In this demographic sense it means those born from 1946 to 1964 (basically, the boomer generation) and still living at least one hundred years later.

But it also comes to be used as a political label to refer to members of the “Lifer Liberation Front,” who resist governmental attempts to “manage” the explosion of longevity and its consequences, and in a spiritual sense to refer to those who choose to live on indefinitely rather than take a slow-acting suicide drug that comes into wide usage. 

Tell us something about the non-fiction books that inspired you to write Lifers: Chip Walter’s Immortality, Inc. and Andrew Steele’s Ageless. 

Immortality, Inc., was one of the main inspirations for Lifers. Chip Walter is an experienced journalist and former CNN bureau chief, and his group portrait of the billionaires and bio-entrepreneurs who populate Silicon Valley’s super-longevity ecosystem begged for a fictional portrayal. So for Lifers I created Gustav Zinnemann, a Silicon Valley microbiologist and serial entrepreneur who designs the “Methuselah genome” and becomes a man on the run from his greatest triumph.

Andrew Steele’s Ageless is a more scholarly work, full of the sort of deep, technical information about how serious, non-profit-driven science is tackling the problem of aging by treating it as a disease in itself, and not a necessary result of living. It opened my eyes to the new discipline of computational biology, which in turn suggested that, in the near future, there might be a direct interface between computer algorithms and human proteins that could alter cellular mechanics and perhaps let us literally reprogram our cells. 

How much have you been influenced by contemporary ageism and what used to be called “the Generation Gap”?

Don’t get me going. I very much hope that Lifers is seen as an anti-ageist screed and a satire on the absurdities of our age-stratified society. I think all of us in western culture are so steeped in ageism, like fish in water, that we’re not even aware of it, though when you grow older, as we all must and I have (I hesitate even to say that for the usual ageist reasons), you can’t avoid feeling its effects – which are, to be specific, ostracism, condescension, progressive invisibility, forced irrelevance, and isolation, to name a few. The very act of writing a novel in one’s seventies is presumed to be such an invitation for rejection that the only rational response is pity. Nonetheless, I’ve written one, and at its heart it’s all about contemporary ageism.

As for “the Generation Gap,” there are so many layers of labelled generations these days (X, Y, Z, Alpha, etc.) that the original generation gap (between the boomer generation and their parents) seems, in retrospect, not much of a gap at all, and was mainly based on just two things: music, and the war in Vietnam. Meanwhile, my daughter can’t understand half of what my grandsons are saying when they’re “mewing” and “rizzing” their way through TikTok. 

Are you aware of the less-well-known episode in Gulliver’s Travels, by Irish writer and satirist Jonathan Swift, which deals with immortality?

I confess I had forgotten about Gulliver’s visit with the immortal “Struldbruggs,” but maybe I remembered that episode subconsciously, because my Lifers, like the Struldbruggs, do continue to age slowly even though they don’t die and, like Swift’s immortals, are deprived of various legal and constitutional rights as they grow older. Swift’s dystopian view of super-longevity has many resonances in Lifers, and I’m grateful to be reminded of them! 

How does Lifers fit into contemporary genres? Would you call it science fiction or satire, or both? 

It’s definitely a blend of both, and the science is only barely fictional. The background of the longevity breakthrough described in the book is based on actual science, and refers to real people, such as the maverick gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, who was an early trailblazer in conceptualizing aging as a disease that can and should be cured. So it’s only science fiction in the sense that the science hasn’t quite gotten there yet, but it’s coming fast. 

There’s a lot of satire in Lifers, particularly around contemporary politics and corporate life, but I hope it’s in service to the story rather than the other way around.  I grew up reading a generation of sci-fi writers who used the genre to satirize social foibles and injustices – authors like Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and Philip K. Dick. Sci-fi as a genre has since taken a much more escapist turn, but I wanted Lifers to hark back to what you might call social sci-fi, and maybe generate some serious discussion about how we regard aging, how we avoid the reality of our mortality, and how we treat the aged in real life. 

You focus on three strong women protagonists: an ex-CIA microbiologist, a Washington insider turned advocate for “grey rights,” and a philosopher of death and dying. What can you tell us about these women and their role in the story?

Marion Altman is the most prominent of the women protagonists. She’s a former Washington insider and heiress to a real estate fortune who fears for the future of her and her husband Dan’s generation of boomers as they age into their second century, and sets out to create a sanctuary for Lifers deep in the Colorado mountains. She’s motivated by a lifetime of experience of being underestimated.

Adele Pritchard is a biowarfare specialist formerly with the CIA and the National Security Council, now well into her second century and leader of an ad hoc global organization dedicated to stopping the spread of the longevity plague. Hidden in her past is the infant daughter she gave up for adoption in the wake of an affair with her then White House colleague – and Marion’s husband – Dan Altman. Adele and Marion must overcome this fraught personal history in order to join forces in defense of Lifers.

Then there’s Claire Landess, who is Marion and Dan’s granddaughter. She’s a feminist philosopher and author of popular books on death and dying who believes that extreme longevity is objectionable on purely moral grounds and vaults to fame and political power with the advent of the longevity plague. As a spokesperson of an anti-Lifer backlash and head of the new federal “Department of Longevity Management,” she becomes the reluctant nemesis of her grandmother Marion’s movement.

What if any challenges are there for you as a man in writing female POV characters? 

For whatever reason, perhaps having to do with the influence of my super-competent mother and my independently-minded spouse, I find that writing from a female point of view comes easily. The challenge, of course, is not to presume too much understanding of women’s unique experience, and to maintain a stance of humble empathy as a writer. 

The presidential election in the States until recently featured two candidates who were both elderly. There are similar statesmen across the world. What do you think of the idea of a gerontocracy and has it influenced your writing?

What an interesting question.  I think our current gerontocracy is a demographic accident, the confluence of the huge post-war baby boom population bulge, the politically turbulent Sixties that were formative years for those now in their seventies and eighties, and advances in medicine and nutrition that make active lives in later years possible. I don’t think this will last, and that after the boomers die off (the first wave of which we’re now seeing), political leadership will gravitate back toward a relatively younger age group.

Regarding my writing, one of the main themes I hope to get across in Lifers is the perniciousness of our unconscious ageism, how we pigeonhole people according to their ages and waste their talents and wisdom as they grow older. A related, crucial point is that people age at vastly different rates and the physical and mental abilities of one eighty-year-old are often completely different from those of another. 

Can you tell us about Taubin, one of your characters who suffers from a condition known as progeria? What is progeria and how does it affect him?

Thank you for asking about Taubin.  I found writing from inside his head and his dialogues with his elders to be a joy, one that came very easily. He’s a neurodivergent (Asperger’s, OCD) social media programmer in his 30s, employed by a biotech company to persuade Lifers to want to end their lives with the company’s slow-acting suicide drug. He’s an expert at creating influencing algorithms that operate in “chipspace,” the realm of distributed neural headchip networks that has replaced the internet.

He eventually contracts a variant of the Methuselah virus that accelerates his aging. In real life, progeria (sometimes called Hutchins0n-Guilford syndrome) is caused by a mutation of the cellular protein lamin-A, which regulates the integrity of the nucleus. The result is accelerated aging that starts in infancy and, tragically, radically shortens lives.

In the book, Taubin embodies two important themes: he’s deeply influenced by and loving toward his doting grandparents, who raised him, so he represents the power of cross-generational bonding which, in the book, quite literally changes the world. And because of his artificially-induced progeria, he’s able to join them in old age, and represents his grandmother’s dream of heaven as a place where everyone is the same age, and age itself becomes meaningless.

You are in your seventies. How much has your personal experience influenced the writing of the novel? 

I’m quite sure I would not have written Lifers ten years ago. It’s the direct product of turning seventy and beginning to think seriously about the remainder of my life, how I want to live it and will be permitted to live it – and about what life would be like if a whole lot of us had the opportunity to “live on,” as they say in the book.

I’ve written an entire essay on the subject of entering my seventies, but suffice it to say that the only proper response to having arrived at this point in a vastly lucky life is sheer gratitude. And I’m deeply, continuously grateful. I’m physically fit, surrounded by remarkable friends and family, and blessed with a loving wife who makes every day a gift. But I’m also greedy. I want more and more of the lucky life I’m living, not less and less. Not only can I do the math, I resent it. I regret not having felt the passage of time more acutely, so that my aging from year to year might have been experienced more fully and honestly, and my age now really would be, as the sweet old lie has it, “just a number.”

Aging is, at bottom, the long foreshadowing of mortality, and that must be the deepest, most unspeakable reason for the stigma we assign to old age. In the book, the philosopher Claire Landess is the spokesperson for acceptance of our death as not only a given, but the morally proper outcome for all of us. I’m not quite there yet, but I want to believe her.

One could argue that the elderly (and their carers) are already poorly treated by society. How much is the future envisaged in your novel already with us?

This is where satire and painful current reality meet. The “sequestration camps” that in the book are set up to house the increasing masses of the old are only a short step from the retirement homes and extended care facilities we accept as normal today. The systematic curtailment of the constitutional rights of the aged depicted in the book are not far different from the curtailment of rights that some political figures would like to enact on all of us today, and that are informally but forcibly imposed on the very old. The overt antagonism exhibited by the “doublers” in the book (those still in their double-digits) toward the “triplers” is foreshadowed in the dismissal of the old as useless and irrelevant that our current society routinely visits on its elders. Need I go on? 

Tell us something about your first novel, When We Were All Still Alive, published in 2021. How does it differ from Lifers and how has your writing process changed?

Lifers is very different in that my first novel was self-consciously “literary,” whereas this new one is more of a thoughtful entertainment. WWWASA was an attempt to emulate a kind of fiction that, when I was a young, was more concerned with intimate relationships and precise description of those relationships than with complex plotlines or exotic circumstances (think Updike, Salter, Evan S. Connell). It’s about a man in late middle age who loses the person dearest to him – his wife – and what that does to him, how it changes his understanding of his past and his future, and his relationships with those around him.

Its connection to Lifers is that it’s also about how we avoid but ultimately have to deal with the fact of our mortality, and about the unfairnesses and consolations of growing older.

Different though that first novel was, I don’t think my writing process has changed much. I write intermittently, spontaneously, and from the gut, in spurts that can last from a few minutes to a few hours, usually in the afternoon. I have a general sense of the story arc, and a clear sense of the major characters, but I follow that arc very organically and it usually takes some unexpected (even to me) turns. I do not outline in detail, though for Lifers I had to create a very detailed timeline with main events and each character’s age at various points, and consulted it constantly.

What are you working on now?

Apart from a lot of blog posting on the current political situation (in Mortal Coil), I’m working on a sequel to my first novel and hope to have a draft done by year-end.

I’m also beginning to think about a sequel for Lifers that would take off from the book’s conclusion, where a very specific form of time travel – actually, collective memory travel – becomes  possible. I want to depart from the current fabulist trend where time travel just “is” – it’s an unexamined premise, not a plausible process (I’m thinking of The Ministry of Time and Sea of Tranquility).  The whole trope of time travel has become a rather tedious cliché and needs some new life injected into it. So that’s my next mission: make time travel believable again.

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About Keith McWalter:

Keith McWalter’s first novel, When We Were All Still Alive, was published in 2021. His essays have appeared in The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He’s the author of two blogs, Mortal Coil and Spoiled Guest, which present his essays and travel pieces to a loyal online following. A collection of his essays, No One Else Will Tell You: Letters from a Bi-Coastal Father, won a Writer’s Digest Award for nonfiction. 

Keith is a graduate of Columbia Law School and earned a BA in English Literature from Denison University. He lives with his wife, Courtney, in Granville, Ohio, and Sanibel, Florida.

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