By Max Bowen
Let’s face it—getting older can suck.
But what if you could change all that?
In Keith G. McWalter’s new book “Lifers,” we’re introduced to a new technology that can a prolong a person’s lifespan. This creates a new world where the young find themselves in the shadow of their elders and the older are resented for not shuffling off their mortal coil.
In this Five by Five interview, McWalter talks about the world created through this new technology and the societal impacts. He shares the real-life science behind his fictional (for now) tech and whether he’d take advantage of it.
I know I would.
What are some of the consequences of a prolonged lifespan that you explore in your book?
When the aged all over the world stop dying, there’s a brief period of confused euphoria. But then society’s attitudes quickly change.
First comes resentment, when it becomes clear that the wealth controlled by the aged is not going to be inherited by their children and grandchildren anytime soon – perhaps never – and that younger generations will continue to live in the older generations’ shadow.
Then comes fear, as it becomes clear that the “young” (called “doublers” in the book, for double-digits, or those under 100) face untold decades more life in a world where youth itself has lost its distinction – that is, its relative immunity to death.
Then, finally, anger, as the failure of the aged to die in the accustomed timeframe puts enormous strains on housing, social services, and national economies, and new political movements arise in an effort to impose “normative lifespans” and “common-good mortality.”
“Lifers” follows a group of age activists as they 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.
How is this prolonged lifespan achieved in your story?
By manipulating the human genome with an artificial virus-like molecule that improves cellular mitochondrial function, rebuilds shortened telomeres, increase sirtuin production, and crafts abnormally high volumes of Daf-2 and Nrf-2 proteins, tricking the cell into behaving as though it’s in a food-scarce environment and slamming on the metabolic brakes.
Just how realistic is this technology? Do you think it’s something we could see in the near future?
All of 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.
While a lot of researchers have recently become more modest in their expectations of when a longevity breakthrough will occur, the futurist entrepreneur Ray Kurzweil, who is 76, believes that if he can live another 10 years, longevity science will extend lifespans for at least a year for every year he lives, thus allowing him and others to achieve longevity “escape velocity.”
Does the book touch on any current issues?
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, 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 “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 toward the “triplers” is foreshadowed in the dismissal of the old as useless and irrelevant that our current society routinely visits on its elders.
The book also touches on climate change and our current political divisiveness.
Is this kind of technology something you’d want to take advantage of?
Yes, I’m glad to be able to say that I’d want to be a “Lifer.” I’ve had a wonderfully fortunate life and don’t think I’d ever give it up willingly, no matter how long I lived. I also hope I’d be so outraged by some of the backlash against the super-aged that’s depicted in the book that I’d be a Lifer in political terms, too—that I’d ally myself with Marion’s “Lifer Liberation Front” and agitate for change. If they’d have me.
