Keith G. McWalter is the author of the new novel Lifers. He also has written the novel When We Were All Still Alive. He lives in Granville, Ohio, and Sanibel, Florida.
Q: What inspired you to write Lifers, and how did you create your cast of characters?
A: 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.
One nonfiction text that was a huge inspiration was Immortality, Inc., by Chip Walter. Chip 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.
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 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.
There’s usually one character in each of my books who’s a loose alter ego of me, similar educational background, usually a lawyer, similar personality traits. Other characters I imagine as a function of the plot and their relationship to the “me” character, though I’m always surprised at how they develop traits and backgrounds that I never anticipated.
Q: Chip Walter said of the book, “Keith McWalter has turned in a stunner of a sci-fi novel that draws on solid science while weaving a story loaded with twists and compelling characters.” What do you think of that description, and what do you see as the role of science in the novel?
A: I’m flattered almost to the point of embarrassment by Chip’s description.
It’s true that the science in Lifers 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 could be cured.
So it’s only science fiction in the sense that the science hasn’t quite gotten there yet, but it’s coming remarkably fast.
I do think the characters, and the reader’s empathy with them, are as important as the plot, since I’ve read too many “speculative” novels recently that have fascinating premises but such unsympathetic protagonists that I couldn’t finish reading them. So I’ll gratefully accept “compelling” as a description of the cast of characters in Lifers.
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I can’t overstate the fact that, for me, the act of stringing sentences together in a logical sequence generates ideas as I go, often taking directions I never anticipated until the words are on the page.
I don’t plot or even 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.
But its plot developed very organically as a mash-up of the very diverse, cross-generational cast of characters, each with their own motivations. And once it was done, I went back and changed sequences of scenes and added backstories where more were needed.
Q: What do you hope readers take away from the story?
A: The one sentiment that I hope would come out of a reading of this book is empathy. It’s really about the consequences of the failure of empathy, both across age groups, and across socioeconomic lines.
The young can’t imagine what it’s like to be old, and the old too often forget what it’s like to be young. The very fact that we use categorical terms like “old” and “young” is evidence of that failure.
The main dramatic function of the character Taubin in the book is that he loves and learns so much from his grandparents, who raised him, and since he’s a victim of progeria, or fast-aging, he’s forced to experience what it’s like to be old when he’s still chronologically young.
He’s a precursor of the utopian state where everyone is the same age, and age itself becomes a meaningless concept.
That’s what I hope readers come away with intellectually: that yes, we can conquer age and maybe even death, but until we also conquer our pernicious ageism, our tendency to pigeonhole people according to their ages and waste their talents and wisdom as they grow older, we will have accomplished very little, and perhaps threatened our very existence.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: 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 in which 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.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: My goal with Lifers is to attract a broad range of readers, including older readers with interest in advances in longevity enhancement, fans of high-concept sci-fi and more literary, socially critical dys/utopian fiction, and certainly female readers attracted to stories of transformational female empowerment.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
No comments:
Post a Comment