Keith McWalter returns this week to discuss his latest novel, Lifers

Author: Keith G. McWalter

Book title: Lifers (a novel)

Book genre: literary dys/utopian fiction

Release date: October 15, 2024

Publisher: SparkPress

Welcome back, Keith! How would you describe your latest release?

Deep in the cells of a young woman’s body, something new is moving, seeking, replicating itself: an artificial genome, part protein, part algorithm, that will shatter the limits of her lifespan and that of every human being on earth.

As populations explode and society’s ingrained ageism turns deadly, three extraordinary women — an ex-CIA microbiologist, a Washington lobbyist turned advocate for gray rights, and her granddaughter, a philosopher of death and dying — navigate violent ageism, the politics of scarcity, love rivalries, and dreams of a centenarian utopia in a trans-generational struggle to redefine what it means to be mortal.

What inspired the idea for this book?

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.

How has your real life (day job, hobbies, etc.) informed your books (or latest release)?

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.

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.

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.

In what ways do you think you’ve evolved as an author since your first book came out?

Lifers is very different in that my first novel was self-consciously “literary,” whereas this new one is more of a thoughtful entertainment. My first novel, While We Were All Still Alive, 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’s your favorite part about writing/being an author? What do you find challenging?

My favorite part about writing is identifying with my characters and watching them take life on the page. In writing Lifers, I closely identified with one of the characters, Taubin, who’s a bit neurodivergent (though I am not), and his close relationship with his grandparents. I found writing from inside his head and his dialogue with his elders to be a joy, one that came very easily.

Every writing project presents its own challenges, but in the case of Lifers, I had three. The first was keeping the timeline straight in a story that spans over a century and starts in the near future — who is what age at what point in the story, what year is it when this or that occurs. I developed a timeline with main events and each character’s age at various points, and consulted it constantly.

The second challenge was how to dole out complex information in a way that doesn’t talk down to the reader but also doesn’t overwhelm. Some of this involved the microbiology that supports the premise, but there are also a lot of numbers in the book, mostly about demographics – how the population of the earth would grow as people stopped dying, how many square miles of wilderness you would need to create a home for several million people, how many people would die in the first year if an “antidote” for the new longevity were developed. Lots of numerical data that had to be conveyed in an engaging way.

The third struggle was over the basic structure of the narrative. My instinct is to write in the first person, and I originally conceived of the book as a series of first-person diary entries by different characters, and the title was “The Methuselah Diaries.” The first few drafts were in that voice, but I finally concluded that it was too unbelievable that all these key characters would be writing detailed diaries in the midst of a crisis, and I reluctantly decided to revert to standard “close third person” narrative and still tell the story from different points of view. That shift, after several drafts had been written, took a lot of time – not to mention thousands of pronoun changes!

What about the writing/editing/publishing process has been the most surprising to you so far (or how has it changed for you over the course of your career)?

While writing itself has, for me, gotten easier over the years – I’m more confident, better read, and more fluid in my approach, less concerned with approval than when I was younger – the whole process of publishing has, to put it bluntly, broken, both in the sense that it’s become ever more severely fragmented, and in the sense that it’s fundamentally dysfunctional. To me, a perfect example of the dysfunction of mainstream fiction publishing is the agent hunt: it’s ridiculous. You have to send out at least 75 or 100 queries to even scratch the surface.

My perception of the market for agents is that it’s mostly populated by kids (overwhelmingly female) in their twenties or thirties who love books and love the idea of being associated with book publishing, few of whom have actually worked for a publisher or have any contacts in the major publishers, and are trying to make their way in a very low-probability system, just as their writers are. Getting an agent is no guarantee that that agent will be able to place your book with a reputable publisher; they’re up against the same low-percentage game as you are. Many of the truly experienced agents have figured out that they can make more money by coaching wannabe authors than by placing books, and that’s what many of them are doing. 

What advice would you give to writers just starting out?

Stop and ask yourself why you’re writing what you’re writing. If it’s mainly a commercial venture in the hopes of making money, then the odds of that outcome are so long that any rational person would stop and go open a stationery store instead. If you’re doing it for the sheer love of writing, or because you have a personal stake in a story that you think needs or deserves to be told, or simply to entertain yourself and some friends and relatives and network pleasurably with like-minded people, then that’s a different (and better) scenario, though still daunting. The one thing you must never, never do is assume you’ll be the one-in-a-million exception and actually make money by publishing a book.

All of this presumes that you’re a solid, competent, well-read writer and self-editor; many people are not, but have been led to believe by what I call the wannabe author exploitation industry that they are or easily could be. Read heavily in the genre you’re writing for and try to objectively observe how your writing compares. If you don’t passionately believe in the quality of your writing and the interest of your subject matter, it’s almost certain no one else will. The hard truth is that most of us are far more competent at something other than writing, and most of us can’t put our lives on hold for a couple of decades to better hone our writing craft. If you think you might need it, don’t hesitate to hire a reputable editor or “book doctor” to evaluate your manuscript and suggest revisions. Don’t rely on friends for this, as they too easily compromise their objectivity, their frankness, or both.

What’s capturing your imagination these days outside of reading and writing?

The high-quality storytelling and production values of the major streaming video platforms. I love series like “The Diplomat” and “Hacks,” and one of the best dramas I’ve seen in a long time was the cross-cultural take on the world of high-end wines in “Drops of God” (on Apple+). Every storyteller should watch that for a lesson in pacing, character development, and dialogue.

Can you tell us about what you’re 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.

What was the last book that stuck with you? Why did it make such a lasting impression?

I just read Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto for the first time and was completely blown away by her ability to flit among her characters’ points of view without skipping a beat. One of the most flattering blurbs for Lifers that I received was one that said, “If Ann Patchett wrote sci-fi, this is what it might look like.”

Where can readers find you?

Facebook: @keith.mcwalter | Twitter: @kgmcwalter | Instagram: @kmcwalter 

Author site: keithmcwalterwrites.com

Blogs: Mortal Coil; Spoiled Guest

Events:

Talking Points Lecture Series: Big Arts, Sanibel, Florida
The Longevity Quest in Fact and Fiction
Chip Walter and Keith McWalter, speakers
https://bigarts.org/event/chip-walter-keith-mcwalter/
March 12, 2025
4:00 pm

Thank you, Keith! Lifers is out now.

Lifers

In the year 2050, the man known as Zinn is on the run from the consequences of his greatest creation: an artificial genome that wildly increases the human lifespan. His “Methuselah gene” has gone viral, and he’s being hunted by Adele, a semi-retired CIA biowarfare specialist who hopes to find a way to reverse the genome’s effects before it’s too late.

As the longevity plague spreads, populations explode, economies are upended, and intergenerational resentments boil over. Adele searches for a cure while her former lover, Dan Altman, and his wife, Marion, wealthy political operatives both, become leaders of a movement of hundred-plus-year-old “lifers” and fight to create a sanctuary for the ultra-aged in the wilds of Colorado. Meanwhile, the Altmans’ son, Nolan, thinks he has the answer to the longevity crisis: a suicide pill that kills after one year, a death wish algorithm that will influence the super-aged to take it, and his beautiful daughter, Claire, who is a spokesperson for the growing anti-lifer backlash and the head of the federal government’s new Department for Longevity Management.

Combining a hugely topical premise with a vein of social-political satire, Lifers evokes a world where society’s ingrained ageism turns lethal and the fear of death is replaced by the challenge of living on . . . and on.