By Nick Mendillo
I met Tim Weed while I was a student enrolled in the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. He was a professor, resident author, and my mentor for a semester. Throughout his lectures, our Zoom meetings, and our general conversations about writing over the course of the program, I found Tim to be an artist with a clear perspective on humanity.
Let’s play two truths and a lie:
- Tim is a woodsman of sorts, who embraces the quiet and serenity of nature between his time in New Hampshire and Nantucket.
- He is an advocate for world culture, directing international educational programs throughout Latin America while also cooking a dynamite seafood paella.
- He knows theoretically how to time travel.
Give up? Number one is a lie—he lives in Vermont.
I would have guessed number three, but after reading his third novel The Afterlife Project, I understood he could easily teach a course on the concepts of time travel as well as climate change in addition to creative writing. His research methods and attention to accurate details demonstrates the man’s professionalism and dedication to fiction. His work is honest, grounded, and inspiring. The Afterlife Project is a story that quite literally transcends time and space.
Released by Podium Publishing in June 2025, the novel arrives at a moment when both science fiction and climate fiction are straining under the weight of genuine, real-world urgency. However, Weed had not written another grim prophecy or thinly veiled political finger-wagging, but a deeply researched and intimate story about the end of the world. Where the world ends for us, Weed’s story begins, as he explores what might remain long after the last human breath.
***
Climate Fiction
Blending climate anxieties that are deeply present in modern culture with physics-driven time travel, Weed constructs a narrative that spans 10,000 years without ever losing emotional bearings or humanism. The Afterlife Project is ambitious while also remaining restrained. It is speculative but also unflinchingly grounded, two traits which are the engine churning underneath the science fiction jargon and futurism. I feel more hopeful for the continuation of humanity after reading.
I never heard of “climate fiction” before but incorrectly assumed it was nothing but preachy, chastising sermons toward those unwilling to recycle. The Afterlife Project is far more sobering. It is not a depiction of a climate catastrophe, but instead a slow unraveling. Weed treats climate change as a series of compounding failures that span from ecological to political to biomedical. What accumulates is a world that has become unrecognizable, and yet, it is a vision that feels uncomfortably plausible. Weed writes of rising seas, shifted currents, failing crops, and a fertility rate that has plummeted for reasons unknown. Pandemics cycle faster than governments can respond. Society does not collapse from some Roland Emmerich-style cinematic fireball, but crumbles and frays until there is nothing left to mend.
Weed’s great achievement is making this slow-burn unraveling feel immediate. The late twenty-first century world he depicts is not far-fetched. It is merely the future we fear, carried forward without any intervention. Weed presents dreadful realism to food shortages, supply chain failures, and infertility. The novel succeeds in not only how it shocks, but how it resonates.
***
Tale of Two Timelines
The novel alternates between two timelines. The collapsing near-future of 2068 (or 12 A.U.C.T) and a radically transformed far-future reached through a time-travel experiment to the year 10151 A.U.C.T.
A.U.C.T., which stands for After Coordinated Universal Time, is the new calendar created after the last hyperpandemic, which almost wiped out the entire population on Earth. (It’s also the Latin abbreviation auct for auctorum, meaning “of authors,” which I found noteworthy.)
The reader follows a small science crew sailing across the Atlantic on a ship called the Solar Barque in the year 2068. The crew’s mission is to locate a fertile woman on a remote island north of Sicily who can join the efforts to preserve the species. It has the same blending of expedition and moral crisis as the film Children of Men, where each decision carries with it the weight of extinction.
The far-future timeline belongs to Nick Hindman, the scientist who was sent forward in time through Weed’s most intriguing speculative device—a Time Dilation Sphere, or TDS. The sphere is a containment pod that can fit one human and manipulates the curvature of space-time itself, powered by a self-depleting cold fusion reactor. Inside the sphere, time flows normally, but outside, time races ahead by millennia. Nick’s journey towards the future is not cryogenic sleep, nor a passing through a shortcut in spacetime known as a wormhole. The journey instead is a controlled field of accelerated, forward-only time-travel.
Nick’s arrival 10,000 years in the future is not triumphant; it is deeply lonely. He walks into a world where nature has not only reclaimed the Earth, but reinvented it. Forests have swallowed cities, rivers have migrated, and new species have joined the ecological animal kingdom. Humanity’s last breath has long since been exhaled, and there is no evidence of their existence beyond rare, scattered relics and geological hints Nick must uncover. We follow his journey understanding his meditations on solitude, memory, and time.
***
Science Fiction Built from Scientific Reality
Weed’s research into scientific accuracy of this fictional world is one of the novel’s greatest strengths. The sheer amount of scientific groundwork beneath the narrative would thrill any true sci-fi nerd like me. Weed not only provides layman’s terms explanations for dense scientific theory, but incorporates cutting-edge discussions about infertility, cellular biology, oceanic systems, and evolutionary trajectories without bogging the reader down with clunky exposition. 10,000 years is roughly how long it would take for the planet to ‘reset’ after a climactic apocalypse such as in the novel, and Weed met with experts to ensure the timeline was truthful.
Nowhere is this more apparent than his description of the time machine. The time-travel sphere is technically two spheres nested within one another, where one’s wave form is tricked into thinking it is moving at near-light speeds. Therefore, while Nick is in cryogenic suspension for a relatively short while, he is moving thousands of years into the future. This form of time travel is theoretically possible according to quantum physics and Einstein’s mathematics of general relativity. Weed spent part of his two-and-a-half years writing this novel also researching how to realistically send someone 10,000 years to the future and met with paleoclimatologists to discuss Earth’s futuristic appearance. When most authors would make up what they could to justify the narrative they envision, Weed took the time (pun intended) to keep the narrative as realistic as possible. He expertly includes a device that keeps the holes in spacetime and any potential holes in his narrative sealed. I was relieved to see that Weed avoided tropes; science fiction doesn’t need to abandon real science to be imaginative.
***
Characters Under Pressure
While science shapes the novel, humanity animates it. The crew of the Solar Barque is captained by Ptolemy and Dr. Natalie Quist, the son and daughter of Cornelius Quist who was a famous billionaire and inventor of the TDS. The narrative of the expedition is delivered in first-person journals of Alejandra Morgan-Ochoa, and while confined to the vessel in dangerous waters, she reveals fractures that emerge when purpose collides with fear. To find a viable, fertile partner for Nick and send her into the future is both necessary and ethically fraught. Weed does not sanitize the conflicts on the ship. Questions of autonomy, sacrifice, and scientific responsibility permeate every conversation. Even when a reader might assume cooperation, each character is wary of another, demonstrating the instability of trust.
Nick, meanwhile, carries the emotional weight of the narrative 10,000 years in the future. His storyline is stripped of interpersonal drama, as the antagonist is time itself, and it appears that time had already won. Nick struggles to not only search for signs of human life but maintain a sense of sanity and stability as he navigates Earth as an alien planet. Weed writes these sections in present-tense, which is an interesting choice as it makes the reader feel as though they are living with their decisions in 2025. In other words, all readers are Nick, having to partake in a world that is foreign. Weed’s tone is calm, emphasizing the spiritual and existential dimensions of having to wander a world that has outlived the human species. Nick is curious, scared, grieving, and sometimes hopeful. His endurance is less about survival than it is about reckoning existence itself.
There is a melancholy beauty in Nick’s world. Humanity’s extinction is not framed as a tragedy for the planet, but as a release from its shackles. Earth is not a victim in this story. Earth benefits from our departure. Weed invites readers to consider this question: Should we cease trying to save the planet if it would thrive best without us?
***
What distinguishes The Afterlife Project from much of the other contemporary climate fiction or science fiction novels is its refusal to sensationalize. Weed appears less interested in disaster than in consequences. The collapse he imagines is not a single event but a long chain of decisions that accumulate over decades. By the time Nick steps out of the TDS, humanity isn’t just dead but faded from memory.
Weed writes this novel quietly, and that’s where much of its emotional power originates. Instead of explosions, we witness erosion. Instead of villainy, we get systems that fail under their own weight.The Afterlife Project is a thoughtful, rigorously imagined novel that pushes science fiction into new boundaries. Weed’s command of language through characterization and scientific detail is expert. The reader is steadily grounded in the speculative elements, and Weed’s characters are deeply connected to a real human experience. For those of us who fear the existential end of humanity due to our own hubris, I recommend this book because, while humanity is all but extinct within its narrative, hope itself flourishes.
