Here’s a slightly odd thing: I’ve recently read two speculative fiction books with the word “project” in the title, and both with postapocalyptic themes: one is set in the near-future after a pandemic (The Tomorrow Project [2025]), and this one, set 10,000 (+/− 18.583) years into the future, in a post-climate-change “hyperpandemic” world. A chilling word, “hyperpandemic,” what with us having just come through a simple pandemic: How much worse would a hyperpandemic be? Much worse: it wipes out, in its first pass, an unknown number of people, and then leaves the rest of the population (bar an estimated .0001 percent of the human race) infertile. Its cause? Well, an attempt to fix what we broke—that is, the climate—through what’s called the Pinatubo Solution:

A newly minted protocol was signed at Davos (the summit had been scheduled for Copenhagen but flooding had rendered that location untenable), and the resulting project—popularly known, again, as the Pinatubo Solution, after the great twentieth century eruption that had cooled the planet for a few years—became the largest scientific collaboration in history. With operational theaters in Iceland, Alaska, Kamchatka, Indonesia, and Chile, the project used bunker bombs and a scaled-up version of deep-drilling technology that had been developed for so-called hydro-fracking to trigger a chain of large, more or less simultaneous volcanic eruptions. The idea was that the eruptions would jettison a massive cloud of sulfates and other particulates into the stratosphere, blocking out enough of the sun’s warming rays to put a temporary halt to greenhouse warming, while the world’s scientific and tech elites mounted an all-out effort to develop some kind of technology capable of stuffing the climate genie back into its bottle.

Sulphate and particle release are, of course, potential and controversial methods of geoengineering for climate cooling. Most of the criticism the method attracts is about how difficult it would be to control the results (and also over how we can accurately identify how much particle release would bring about enough cooling), but Tim Weed has imagined something even worse: The release of a pathogenic microbe into the troposphere that infects every single human being on the planet.

It may feel like apocalypse has always been with us in the sense of the end of the world—only it hasn’t, really, because the Greek word we use, apokálupsis, means only revelation. Presumably a speaker of Greek from the past would be a little bewildered by the sense we give the word now, of the world ending and of dire things happening cosmically far beyond the control of mere humans. Although we’ve had postapocalyptic literature since the Epic of Gilgamesh, the idea of cataclysm has really taken root in literature since the nineteenth century, and in film since the twentieth, particularly after the geopolitical nightmares of two world wars.

When I think about the last man on Earth (ask an insurer if it’s even likely, by the way, that it will be a man), what I’ve pictured, due to a story I can no longer find that I was exposed to early in my journey to becoming an SF stan, is a solitary human on a planet essentially melted and/or made sere by a dying Sun. I never imagine a richly green, flourishing biosphere ten thousand years into the future, where many kinds of other species have recovered from the Anthropocene and are thriving. But this is what Tim Weed has conceived: A man wakes up in a capsule in a cave after the apocalypse, and exits the cave into the lushness of someplace in the wilderness of North America. As the story unravels backwards into the past, we learn that he entered the capsule after the hyperpandemic.

With the central conceit being humans dying out through infertility, fertility symbolism is everywhere in The Afterlife Project. This last man, whose name is Dr. Hindman (very clever), has travelled into the deep future in a womb- or egg-like sphere. He’s reborn in that underground cave, passing back up to the surface through a “slanted chimney of rock.” There’s profuse, exuberant plant and animal life all around him. In the past, the remaining workers responsible for the Centauri Project that placed Hindman in the sphere locate a child born after the hyperpandemic, which raises their hopes for a while—but the child is in the grip of a fertility cult complete with an unhinged female leader.

Reading The Afterlife Project also triggered for me thoughts of colonial conceptions of wilderness, and Turner’s Frontier Theory. This follows, I think, from Hindman ending up in a future where he’s surrounded by pure and actual North American wilderness, terra nullius, and because the return to health for the planet is achieved through the removal of (almost) all humans. This includes even those humans who lived in harmony with nature for centuries through responsible environmental management—that is, the Indigenous and First Nations of North America. Hindman, the only person who survives to see this, is presumably a white man (although this is not made explicit, it is made clear that other characters are not white when they aren’t). And Hindman, our unlikely hero, is a scientist with no other attributes of note except that his sperm happened to survive the hyperpandemic, and that he happened to be in the Project. For these reasons alone, he is sent to the future as a vessel for his sperm, under the assumption that he will find some healthy young woman with whom to restart the human race. It is striking, and perhaps accidentally a terrible irony, that the last human who is (fruitlessly) “lord” over this pristine and now truly empty Edenic newness—the last Adam—is a white man.

There are some beautiful passages, mostly at the beginning and end of the novel, when Weed describes this new world:

He climbs up into the swaying treetop and gazes out over the old growth forest. The leafy green canopy stretches out in all directions, unbroken except by a few lakes and ponds and the highest point in the surrounding landscape—the reassuringly familiar exposed granite pinnacle of Mount Wingandicoa. The sky above the canopy is cloudless and teeming with birds: flocks of white egrets and honking Canada geese, crows and ravens wheeling, turkey vultures and raptors riding the thermals. He tries to use the mountaintop to triangulate his current location compared to the former Lab site, but it’s nowhere near precise enough. He’ll have to try to find it walking the forest floor.

When we first meet the last man, we get all of the backstory. In between, as Hindman gets used to the idea of being possibly the last man on the planet, and while he searches for other survivors, he meditates on the value of human culture and on meaning (he’s spending a lot of time on his own): “How thoroughly the human footprint has been erased by nature, eroded, covered over and washed away,” Weed writes. One of the things Hindman ponders in a marvellous passage is human civilisation in the context of geological time, how much human history would fit in just a single paragraph:

The whole arc of the species passing through his mind like a slideshow in a conference room in some long-crumbled city. The dawn of consciousness. A blurry snapshot of the beckoning savannah through parted branches. Horses and aurochs painted on a cave wall. The Bering land bridge. New settlements at Abu Hureyra and Jericho. The killing at spearpoint of the planet’s last saber-toothed cat. Before anyone had a chance to question what it might mean, Homo sapiens had traded in its habitual nomadism for planting and harvesting, hoarding and trade. The domestication of cattle.  The invention of alphabets and iron smelting—because there was no stopping progress. The rise of the city states: Minoans, Sumerians, Egyptians, Olmecs. Gilgamesh and Imhotep, the Great Pyramid and Stonehenge, Solomon and Buddha. Slideshow running faster now: Lao-Tse, Alexander the Great, Rome and Teotihuacán, Jesus and Muhammad, the Tang Dynasty, Leif Eriksson, Genghis Khan. The whole sordid history of ignorance and savagery, of fumbling in the darkness with occasional lunges toward the light. Maimonides and Alfonso el Sabio, da Vinci and Shakespeare, Zheng He and Isaac Newton. Philosophy and learning, art and exploration, advances in science and medicine, the industrial revolution and the technological revolution, but always the darkness came flooding back. Plague and famine, slavery and prostitution, greed and demagoguery. Wars of conquest, of tribalism and religion and race. The senseless slaughter of crusades and jihads, holocausts and ethnic cleansings and the utter banality of evil.

There are, of course, many ways to think about meaning. Most, however, are not to be found in the scientific view of the world, but in metaphysics and religion. They may not have the concrete answers of the scientific method, but I think they give us a better means to go on, and a reason to fight for the future. They help with existential questions, like “Why are we even here?” Without them, our tendency seems to be to nihilism—and there’s a trace of that in this novel. If The Afterlife Project was born of the despair of watching us eliminate ourselves as a species, that’s perfectly understandable—because everything humans are doing right now feels like an acceleration towards our nullity. But this novel does not offer redemption or any kind of faith in who we are as a species. Weed gives this last man only one slim reason for hanging on: his hope that someone else, somewhere, has survived, even perhaps a group of people—that somehow humans have found at the last minute a way to leapfrog over all our mistakes, and into the future. Grimly, after the tiniest flicker, that light goes out.

Having given up on humanity, Weed offers then in The Afterlife Project a different hope—not, in the end, the furtherance of H. sapiens, but the possibility—even probability—of life on Earth proceeding by other means.

I’m not as hopeless as Weed seems to be about our prospects. The grimness of life under capitalism, and the likelihood of our frying ourselves out of existence—these things feel completely inevitable right now, particularly if you’re presently in some city in the Global North in 2025’s summer (at the time of writing, temperatures in Europe are reaching the forties in Celsius). But stepping away from all the things humankind has built for a while and spending time in nature, you’ll see some of that resilience that Weed so vividly imagines 10,000 years into the future. You’ll feel hope spring up: If nature is so resilient, maybe we can turn the corner. Many of us will die; unlike Weed, though, I believe that not all of us, or even most of us, will. Even with the evidence of all those past extinctions, I believe that all the things that set H. sapiens apart—and the cause of all our current and future problems—will, eventually, save us. We will have to find new ways to survive—but Indigenous people all over the world have done this for centuries.

For so many, the apocalypse has already happened, and they came through. Even this late in the day, maybe, just maybe, some of those pockets of humanity will make it 10,000 (+/− 18.583) years into the future to meet the lush, renewed Earth that Weed visualises.