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.
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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