I was in bed scrolling on my phone when I read the headline: Hot mic catches Xi and Putin discussing organ transplants and immortality. It took me a long time to get to sleep after that. Not yet, I thought. I pride myself on my prescience, but I wasn’t ready for the future I had imagined to arrive so soon.
Since 2017, I’ve been thinking about the implications of longevity research, sketching out possible futures – the shifts in society, the complications and subcultures. This year I published the result of my thought experiment, Who Wants to Live Forever, a speculative literary novel. It follows Yuki and Sam, a couple at a crossroads at the same time that a new drug, called Yareta – which extends the human lifespan by 200 years and preserves youth – becomes available. Sam takes it, Yuki doesn’t, and the novel follows the fallout as the world changes around them. The story ends in 2039. Naively, considering the billions being poured into longevity research by the likes of Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Bryan Johnson (subject of this year’s Netflix documentary Don’t Die), I thought that was how long it might take for my fiction to become reality.
