Review of Lifers by Keith G. McWalter

I’ve been thinking a lot about aging and mortality lately. I’m only thirty-five, but as I head into this next phase of my life and ponder what I want from it, I find myself focusing a lot on what life will be like when I am much older. Lifers is a thought experiment asking us to imagine what would happen if we suddenly had even more time. In a world where the richest are obsessed with not aging, this book is an interesting what-if story. Keith G. McWalter has put a lot of time into exploring one possible vision of what our world might be like if life extension becomes widespread. I received a copy in exchange for a review.

In the mid-twenty-first century, old people stop dying. Governments eventually figure out this “Methuselah plague” is contagious, a gene therapy packaged in a retrovirus that improves our cellular repair mechanisms. The ultra-aged—people near or over the centenarian mark—are pejoratively called Lifers by some. If you live in a country with an aging population, like here in Canada, you can probably see where this is going: as countries start to have millions of people who have outlived their retirement funds, the population pyramid practically collapses from how top-heavy it is. The story follows a small, interwoven cast of characters, most of them Lifers, as they adjust to and try to build the new world.

At first I could not get into Lifers. The chapters bounced around from character to character, subplot to subplot. McWalter’s writing style at first was very dull and obvious, and there were some typical “men writing women” discrepancies in how he described male versus female characters…. His perspective, too, is a very American one—the book is mostly set in the US and focuses on the American politics around the Lifer issue, with a heavy focus on a libertarian, pioneer-style answer to the problem. And most of these issues don’t really disappear as the book goes on.

But it did, to my surprise, start to win me over.

As the narrative coalesces around a couple of characters, particularly the married Lifer couple Dan and Marion, I began to get drawn into the emotional stakes of the political conflict at the heart of the plot. Because McWalter is absolutely right about one thing: in our current society, which already treats elderly people and poor people very poorly, a Lifer situation would be horrific and intractable. But what do you do? For all my complaints about style, McWalter really does outline the problem and show some scarily realistic possible responses to it.

The ending of the book is really poignant. I won’t spoil anything, but I really loved seeing the dynamic between Dan and Marion. I was a little dissatisfied with what happens with Claire, simply because McWalter spends so much time earlier in the novel establishing her deep-seated philosophical perspective on the Lifer issue. Her apparent change of heart is just never addressed; I guess we are supposed to infer it’s a consequence of what happens to her near the climax of the book, but it still feels odd the book never acknowledges her complete one-eighty?

Alas, in the grand scheme, Lifers still very much has that too-clean feel of someone dipping their toes into speculative fiction without fully embracing what science fiction as a genre has to offer. McWalter’s narration is dry and matter-of-fact, and despite Dan and Marion growing on me by the end, overall the characters are all kind of cardboardy and allegorical. They exist to be author avatars, to have debates and help McWalter spool out the thought experiment. In this respect it reminds me a lot of Neal Stephenson’s work, especially his more recent stuff. It’s not bad per se, but it isn’t the kind of science fiction into which I like to sink my teeth.

Lifers is a story with an interesting premise and some endearing moments. While I won’t get excited about it, I’m also happy to have read it, to have been pushed to think about this a little more. Deeply saturated science-fiction fans like me probably won’t see much going on here, but people who prefer lighter spec-fic fare will probably find a lot more here to enjoy.