What would happen if science finally proved that life continues after death?

Now imagine discovering that the promise doesn’t apply to everyone.

That’s the world at the center of Don Schechter’s Ascendants, a near-future science-fiction techno-thriller set in 2060. After technology seemingly demonstrates the existence of life after death, society is transformed—until the institution responsible reveals that only people possessing a particular genetic marker can ascend.

On this episode of Beyond the Page, I talk with Don about the unusually long journey behind the novel. The original idea appeared roughly twenty years ago as a scene he imagined for a film. That eventually grew into screenplays, an anthology of short films set within the same universe, and finally the novel that tells the story he’d wanted to tell from the beginning.

How would people behave if they knew an afterlife existed? What happens when that certainty is suddenly taken away from part of the population? And what happens when extraordinary technological power becomes concentrated in the hands of a small number of people?

It’s a wide-ranging conversation about science fiction, creativity and what happens when the future imagined by speculative fiction starts feeling increasingly close to the world outside our doors.

Find Don: https://donschechter.com/

Watch or listen to the full conversation with Don Schechter on Beyond the Page.