Below is a review of The Afterlife Project by Tim Weed, kindly written by @kinkeeper.bsky.social.
Articles that appear in my doom-scroll feed about the destruction of our Earth’s natural resources get skimmed, compartmentalized, repressed, and rapidly filed in the “End of World” folder on my email server. (Until mid-2025, the file was named “End of World?” with a question mark.) I have not been able to bring myself to read books on this issue either. They gather dust on my bookshelves, as a matter of self-preservation.
But since the destruction of our only home is now obviously exponential in nature (In nature! Ha!), and in combination with the rapid and shocking downfall of my home country’s democracy that includes deliberate dismantling of Earth-care acts in the name of money and power, I am opening my psyche’s doors to all of the emotions. Go big, go home, and go to a therapist who believes that climate change is real.
Being that Everything is DoomedTM, I am cracking into my untouched trove of Cli-Fi and Cli-Nonfi. I began with The Afterlife Project, by Tim Weed.
It is a used copy, intentionally purchased at a local independent bookstore; no additional production at the expense of resources, and no 2-day delivery by a company overseen by a human who is hellbent on hoarding wealth and power rather than saving our planetary home.
As I shuffled through the bright book covers on my To Be Read shelf, I picked The Afterlife Project first, merely because the cover art reflected my mood at that time: calm, muted, and a bit blurred at the edges. The content within, however, was far from muted or blurred.
If you’ve ever watched a movie about the restaurant industry, (such as Chef or Julie & Julia), you’ll notice that a good director will fill your eyes with the most sumptuous visuals of food. Vegan mouths water because of that slo-mo shot of a chef slicing brisket. Dairy intolerant folks shed tears over the sizzling visuals of cheese melting on a griddle. Stomachs rumble, the pause button on the remote is punched, and refrigerators are raided.
This is much like reading The Afterlife Project. The lush descriptions of 11th millennium Earth and its flora and fauna made me yearn to drop everything and just go. Go…out. Anywhere. Somewhere. A place of green and clean air and toes in dirt and sounds that overlap into a cacophony of life.
While reading, one can’t help but think “this is how Earth is supposed to be and humans are definitely not the superior species here.” The lush narration within The Afterlife Project conjures smells, sounds, textures, and visuals of a planet that should be, of soil that we should long to kneel upon, of animals that deserve to live unfettered by the whims of humans. (For all of our self aggrandizing about our technological and industrial accomplishments, it remains to be seen how increasing amounts of cement and glass can compare to the luxury of untouched nature.) If you’re a city kid, I challenge you to read this book and not have a mustard seed of desire for nature sprout within your hurried heart.
After one particular mind-bending imaginative trip through an 11th millennium Earth forest (a literal trip thanks to the character’s experimentation with Amanita muscaria fungi), a certain sentence punched me in the gut: “Now that humanity is pretty much out of the picture, has the torch of sentience been passed on to some other being?” This musing can really get to you, if you let it. And you should let it, as the author follows with the character’s realization that his life is deeply connected to that which surrounds him: he has not been alone in the woods after all…he is surrounded by life, sometimes unseen but always felt.
And just how did 11th millennium Earth come to be in such a state of untouched beauty in The Afterlife Project? The causes of humanity’s demise and subsequent flourishing of non-human life on Earth are not the main points of the book. Although, when discussed, the causes are uncomfortably familiar or tangential to the content of our actual reality: every climate scientist’s post on BlueSky, every book written by experts which apparently are screams into the void.
The main character eventually absorbs into his very being, his very soul, that the world around him is his life and his life is the world around him. As it should be. Imagine if every human on Earth worshipped our only home in the way it deserved. Just imagine.
Someday, humanity deserves to see this book translated in big screen format. I have specific demands for this theatrical rendition: Christopher Nolan will direct, the trailer song will be “Below Sea Level” by Ben Harper, and the main character will be played by some random person not yet famous (someone unrecognizable to the general public, as to create a sense of “this could be me perhaps this is all of us”.) I want my fellow humans to see the indescribable beauty of what happens when a single human loves the Earth with his whole being.
These are my demands as I close the bent cover of The Afterlife Project and tuck it away on my Keep Forever bookshelf. And I think the point here is…Tim Weed made it beautifully and painfully clear: we don’t have forever.