GNew novel by Manchester author explores life in 2090
A year and a half after the release of his debut novel, The Light Years, Manchester author Rob Greene is back with his sophomore effort, Twenty-five to Life — though, technically, it’s the novel he wrote first.
“I started writing it 10 years ago as an MFA student at [Southern New Hampshire University],” said Greene, who writes as R.W.W. Greene. “It’s just changed a lot. It had a different name, it was bigger, there were three point-of-view characters. Over the years I just kept picking at it. I unraveled it and stitched it back up again.”
Twenty-five to Life is set in 2090 and follows 23-year-old Julie Riley, who is forced by law to live with her mother until she turns 25. With climate change making it harder and harder for humans to survive on Earth, a humanity-saving mission brings some of the population to Proxima Centauri, but Julie is one of the 9 billion people left behind. Not wanting to be stuck inside with her mother for the next two years, interacting with others mostly through virtual reality, Julie runs away. She joins the Volksgeist, a group of nomads traveling American back roads in converted vans, trucks and buses, and partners up with an older woman named Ranger.
“Most good science fiction is based in reality and it’s kind of a metaphor for something else,” Greene said. “I don’t do a lot of space battles and light sabers.”
In this case, he said, the book delves into what life has been like for the most recent generations.
“The millennials and the Gen Y and Gen Z situation — [this book looks at] what those guys have been going through economically and socially and kind of projects it out to what it might look like in 2090,” Greene said.
Twenty-five to Life is also a work of climate fiction, so Greene focused a lot of his research on climate change.
“This area will have 90 90-degree days a year in 2050,” he said. “Sea levels will have risen. … Fenway Park will be under water. It’s kind of interesting looking at that and figuring out what kind of life [we might be living].”
Greene said the pandemic didn’t influence the plot, though during the editing process he did have to acknowledge it.
“Really I just had to make note of the fact that there was a pandemic and there have been other Covid varieties, that there might be a Covid-79 in 2079,” he said. “Any book that’s going to be set in the near future has to take into account that we had Trump, we had the pandemic.”
Other real elements of the novel are the main character’s name — Julie Riley is the name of a student Greene had when he taught at Nashua High School South — and where she travels during her road trip.
“I got a U.S. map and I kind of plotted out the entire journey and researched where she might stop,” Greene said. “Some of the places I’d actually been to, but most of the places I just did research on.”
Greene is currently working on what might end up being a trilogy; he’s already sold the first two books to his publisher, U.K.-based science-fiction and fantasy publisher Angry Robot Books.
“One is done, one is almost done,” he said. “I hope to start [the third one] in October.”
The books are an alternative history set in the 1970s to 1990s, and aliens have destroyed Cleveland. He expects the first two to be published in May 2022 and May 2023.
Greene’s writing process hasn’t changed too much with the pandemic, though it did throw him off early on.
“The first three or four months I had a hard time getting anything going. I kind of felt creatively empty,” he said. “I played a lot of guitar and finally managed to get my writing going again.”
He also created an ad hoc online writers group after throwing out the idea to a couple of people he met on Twitter. Word spread, and now the group gets together via Google Meet a few times a week, sharing tips and encouragement.
“It’s almost like going to the bar with your friends except there’s no bar,” Greene said, “and for some people it’s 5 o clock at night and some people it’s 10.”
Twenty-five to Life was scheduled to be released Aug. 24, with a U.S. launch at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. An event at the Bookery in Manchester is scheduled for Aug. 31, and Greene is hoping it will still happen in light of the surge of Covid cases — it might be a replay of 2020’s The Light Years launch.
“We got four live appearances out. The last one was I think March 11 at the Bookery, and then the next day the world shut down,” he said.
Meet Rob Greene
Where: The Bookery, 844 Elm St., Manchester
When: Aug. 31, 5 p.m.
Twenty-five to Life is available for purchase at local bookstores and on amazon.com. Visit rwwgreene.com.
Featured photo: Rob Greene. Courtesy photo.
