# Attitudes To Death In Speculative Fiction



## Stephen Palmer (May 28, 2010)

*Attitudes To Death In Speculative Fiction*

_This is an article I wrote some time ago for an SF magazine; here reprinted._


There is a marvellous scene in Ursula K. Le Guin's _A Wizard Of Earthsea_ where a black shadow is summoned by Ged, or Sparrowhawk, the trainee wizard. He summons this spirit in pride and in hate, urged on by his juvenile associates. He is told:

'You summoned a spirit from the dead, but with it came one of the powers of Unlife. Uncalled it came from a place where there are no names. Evil, it wills to work evil through you... It is the shadow of your arrogance, the shadow of your ignorance, the shadow you cast. Has a shadow a name?'

Where did this shadow come from?

'Then the sallow oval between Ged's arms grew bright. It widened and spread, a rent in the darkness of earth and night, a ripping open of the fabric of the world. Through it blazed a terrible brightness. And through the bright mishapen breach clambered something like a clot of black shadow...'

For millennia human beings have imagined the environment of death to be an actual land, as real as Wales, and possibly as gloomy. Le Guin casts her own glamour over her depiction of the dark side, but it is essentially the same as the prehistoric depiction. Certain concepts are foundations: spirit or soul; life after death; a land in which the dead live, separated from us by ethereal, yet muscular boundaries; the possibility of communication between the two sides. Yet are these concepts rooted in reality? Are they in fact simple illusions created by humans beings who lacked objective knowledge of the world?

You and I may consider the notion of life after death, of spirit, of soul, to be ludicrous. How easy it is for us to conclude that ancient people could not bear, let alone understand, the business of dying, and so created illusions with which to assuage their distress. But we must not laugh just yet at the religious, in case they have a point.

My aim in writing this article is to see if writers of speculative fiction have been able to create new metaphors of death. I myself have no belief in the existence of an afterlife. I hope my body will rot into organic goodness after I die. Nor do I have belief in spirit or soul. The word spirit is derived from the Latin _spiritus,_ 'breath, spirit', from _spirare,_ 'breathe'. It is clear from this derivation alone that ancient people considered themselves owners of an immaterial part that could travel to the land of the dead, and this, to my mind, is persuasive evidence against believing in the afterlife. But enough, for the moment, of ancient peoples.

Paul McAuley memorably described Alastair Reynolds' _Revelation Space_ as 'gonzo cybergoth space opera', a phrase that at once made the book an attractive purchase to me. The finale of this novel contains an interesting reversal of standard human thinking on death. Arrogant scientist Dan Sylveste is determined to discover what happened to the alien Amarantin homeworld of Resurgam. Eventually he is led to Hades, apparently a neutron star, which is in fact something more. When the pilot Khouri arrives there also she learns:

'"You died" [said Pascale] "and you were recreated. Your body was reconstructed from the chemical elements already present in the matrix's outer crust, and then you were reanimated, and quickened to consciousness..."'

And we learn from Sylveste himself:

'He told her... how he had passed into the matrix - at which point, his memories diverged from his other self. But when he told her he was sure that his other self was dead, he did so with such conviction that Khouri wondered if there was not another way of knowing...'

It is as if Resurgam is not the other side, the dark side, but an alternate version of the real side. Being simulated by a computational matrix is a clever take on the myth of the afterlife. There is for Sylveste a life after death, but it is on the same side.

One of the greatest myths of the dead concerns Dracula the vampire. A modern take on this myth was provided by China Mieville in his epic novel _The Scar,_ in which we meet the Brucolac, more than three hundred years old, his body ruined by light; the leader of the vampir. He is termed Deadman, while he terms others Liveman. But is he undead? Mieville, alas, is too clever to tell us. Lashed cruciform to a mast in one of the novel's most memorable images, the Brucolac is bleached by sunlight and healed by darkness. He is, it seems, one of those most symbolic of human creations, a being of the boundary, in this case of the boundary between day and night: life and death.

Boundary creations abound in human symbolic thought. Cerberus, The Ferryman, Janus of the threshold, the medium, the ghost-hunter. Some of these creations mimic the status of the shaman, that most ancient of boundary dwellers, who has the ability on behalf of his tribe to deal with the entities of the other side. But recently a new theory has been proposed concerning those who inhabit 'liminal' environments (that is, those between two fundamentally different environments). In Timothy Taylor's _The Buried Soul_ it is suggested that the so-called bog-people - remarkable preserved bodies found in bogs in countries such as Denmark, Holland, Germany and in Cheshire in England - are placed and treated because of ancient attitudes to death. Raised bogs are a liminal environment, neither land nor water, often mobile, like great green blisters. In 1771, after a period of heavy rain, Solway Moss expanded and burst, drowning houses beneath twelve metres of watery peat.

It was into this kind of environment that ancient European peoples placed certain of their number. Often these unlucky men, women and children were killed in multiple ways. Taylor theorises that their fate was to be:

'...taken to a liminal place, vexed beyond belief, and then thrust, body and soul at once, through into another world... this was not the grand world of the dead, but the mysterious, twilight world of the elves... [who] could guarentee exclusion from all that was socially important, living or dead.'

The bog people were deemed problematic to society. To exclude them not only from the world of the living but also from the world of the dead they were multiply killed, then cast into the liminal world. There they were neither one thing nor the other. And this gives us an important insight into the thinking of ancient people. To them, the world of the dead - the afterlife - was as real as their own world. It was not enough simply to kill a person who brought shame; that wrongdoer had to be cast out of the dark land beyond also. Death was feared. Dead people, who were thought to continue in the afterlife, were also feared.


Though Dracula, the Brucolac _et al_ are not creations of shame, they are nonetheless boundary dwellers, and as such exercise immense power over the human psyche. Individuals of shame were killed using more than one method in the ancient world, and with forensic precision: garotted, stabbed, drowned. Vampires similarly need to be killed in specific ways. This cultural method of dealing with what people fear is a method of social exclusion. It speaks eloquently of our inability to cope with the truth of our own demise.

In Bruce Sterling's _Schismatrix_ there is another intriguing description of futuristic death. Abelard Lindsey is one man amongst many struggling to survive in the post-Earth chaos of the solar system. Towards the end of his story he discovers that a coma of five years has passed, during which human life has undergone a 'Prigoginic Leap' (named after Ilya Prigogine, systems scientist), which is a new kind of spontaneous self-organisation. And Lindsey's enemy Constantine is dead:

'...so to speak, but it's a question of definition. I have the scans on his condition from his congenetics. The damage is very severe. He fell into a protracted fugue state and suffered an accellerated consciousness that must have lasted for subjective centuries... It lasted so long that his personality was abraded away. Speaking metaphorically, he forgot himself to pieces.'

What a marvellous description of death! Sterling, who must rate as one of the great thinkers of speculative fiction, here pushes the boundaries of imaginary demise. He effectively said that Constantine is experiencing time in all its tedious, expansive totality, second by second, without any means of slipping into those states natural to us, who on occasion can while away the hours in sweet daydream.

As an interesting aside, John Gribbin remarked in his excellent work _Deep Simplicity:_

'Prigogine showed... that a dissipative system in the linear regime settles down not into the state of death corresponding to maximum entropy (as it would be in equilibrium), but into a state where entropy is being produced as slowly as possible, and the dissipative activity is ticking over at a minimum rate... Things exist in a steady state in the linear regime; a human being, for example, can maintain his or her integrity for many years using the flow of energy (and food) through their body, although in this case the steady state eventually breaks down, for reasons which are still not understood.'

So in simple breakdown lies Death's sting.

Returning to mythic writing, I want to turn to Neil Gaiman's _American Gods._ One of the most memorable scenes concerns the terrible ordeal of Shadow, hung, rather like the Brucolac, upon a tree. In this specifically Norse vision of Gaiman's we meet certain symbolic beings whose utterances give us clues; a squirrel, for instance. Later, after the inevitable blackness, Shadow walks through what he supposes is the afterlife. He meets certain gods, including Bast, who remarks:

'"There's dead, and there's dead, and there's dead. It's a relative thing."'

Shadow suspects that he is dead. He believes he is inhabiting a land. He meets a man on a low, flat boat: a ferryman. Yet, a little later:

'Mr Jacquel opened the last door for Shadow, and behind that door there was nothing. Not darkness. Not even oblivion. Only nothing.'

And this, of course, illustrates the problem human beings have with death. It is a logical impossibility to imagine non-existence. The best we can do is describe a shadow of it, using mere words. Most people, when pressed, will admit that it is not death itself they are frightened of, it is the suffering that all too often precedes death. Yet, it is possible for a premonition of death to be a good thing.

I do not wish to give the impression that "fantasy" deals only with illusory re-tellings of human myth, whereas "science-fiction" deals with original speculation about the future of humanity. So it is with some pleasure that I mention one of the most remarkable, inspirational and emotionally satisfying speculative descriptions of death. It occurs, of all places, in Tolkien's _The Lord Of The Rings,_ but not in the tale itself. Rather, it lies in one of the appendices, where Aragorn speaks on his deathbed to Arwen Undomiel:

'I am the last of the Numenoreans and the latest King of the Elder Days; and to me has been given not only a span thrice that of Men of Middle-Earth, but also the grace to go at my will, and give back the gift. Now, therefore, I will sleep.'

I've always found these lines deeply moving. Aragorn, aware that he cannot 'wither and fall from my high seat unmanned and witless', is able to surrender life through a voluntary process. In this passage Tolkien, despite his ignoble status as a Christian who believed in God, spirit and the afterlife, managed to articulate both our fear of death and the grace we would aspire to, in just a few sentences. This is a mark of his stature as one of the great storytellers of our time.

It seems to me that we must also consider the sheer longevity of the idea that every human being has a non-corporeal spirit which survives after bodily death. We have to go back a considerable way to reach the earliest uncontroversial human burials, to a time 70,000 years ago, a period when both _homo sapiens_ and _homo neandertalensis_ were roaming the planet. (There is possible evidence of burials dating to earlier periods.) One of the most interesting ancient burials is that of a Neandertal boy in the Teshik-Tash cave of Uzbekistan. A description of how he was laid to rest can be found in Richard Rudgley's _Secrets Of The Stone Age:_

'A solitary bone tool, made from a bone of a Siberian mountain goat, lay close to the body of the boy... Five or six pairs of horns of the mountain goat were arranged in an upright position (inclined towards the skull) with their pointed ends down in a roughly circular pattern around the skull and adjacent parts of the skeleton... The pattern of the interlocking pairs of goat horns found next to the skeleton convinced the excavators that they had been consciously placed there as part of a funerary rite.'

For Neandertal people therefore, almost a hundred thousand years ago, life and death were already distinct states; and it was this notion that allowed them to wonder what happened to individuals after death. But for how many millennia before were such beliefs prevalent?

Fast forwarding into the Classical era we can study Homer's _Odyssey_ to find this passage, where Odysseus is spoken to by his mother concerning the afterlife:

'This is no trick played on you by Persephone, Daughter of Zeus. You are only witnessing here the law of our mortal nature, when we come to die. We no longer have sinews keeping the bones and flesh together, but once the life-force has departed from our white bones, all is consumed by the fierce heat of the blazing fire, and the soul slips away like a dream and flutters away on the air.'

And finally, in our own era, we can turn to the gripping finale of Robin Hobb's _Royal Assassin,_ in which FitzChivalry, having been captured and tortured, cheats death by spiritually communing with the wolf Nighteyes:

'How does one leave one's body behind? I tried to ignore it, to be aware of myself only as Nighteyes. Keen nose... I tasted snow and my own paw as I nibbled and licked it away... But there was still that thread, that tiny awareness of a stiff and aching body on a cold stone floor. Just to think of it made it more real... Suddenly, it was all too easy. Such an easy choice. Leave that body for this one... No point to being a man at all.'

Though I read this novel well over a decade ago, the memory of the emotional resonance, of the awe of the above passage remains with me to this day. Hobb's great skill with character, in parallel with the power of the torture scenes, meant that I, like any reader, was desperate to know if FitzChivalry would escape being murdered. And he did. But, alas, it was an illusion.

Or is it alas? It is possible to trace the concept of life and death, and the parallel concept of spirit or soul, over tens of thousands of years, from our Neandertal ancestors right up to the present day. 'Life has to be a preparation for some other dimension,' claimed the New Age guru Terence McKenna. But this claim, made by all religions - including the secular religions of the twentieth century - is based on a misunderstanding. I accept that it is an understandable misunderstanding, but it is nonetheless an error, as can be shown by the work of such writers as Alastair Reynolds and Bruce Sterling. For if they can imagine other modes of death, then the traditional, so ordinary, so tired and so obvious mode can also be imaginary.

Of course, I cannot prove any of this. But neither can Terence McKenna or the Pope prove their views. We must decide on balance of likelihood. Ignoring the logical contradictions of arguments in favour of spirit and the afterlife, let us instead ask the simplest, and therefore the best, question. There is no evidence for the existence of ghosts, of vampires, of the particulars of shamanic culture. There is no evidence for the existence of the afterlife. There is no evidence to show that we each carry a spirit within us. No communication claimed by a medium has ever been shown to be real. And the unexplained may not be used as positive evidence: claiming that the 'white light' of near-death-experience is unexplained, for instance, is not positive evidence for an afterlife, nor even an indication of its possibility.

Isn't it simpler and more reasonable to think that once our bodies fail our selves do also? Why should we carry on re-inventing the complications of afterlife, of spirit, of that unimaginable threshold? Belief in life after death cheapens life. Though it is a comforting illusion to many, it is nonetheless an illusion. Belief that living is preparation for something else leaches authenticity from life.

Mastery of the fear of death is gained by enjoying life to the full. Though I know I will die, I hope that when the time comes I will have done all that I need to do; and if I have, then I will feel no sting. Such hope sustains me, and it can sustain us all. It is a tragedy that so many people substitute religion for effort and illusion for reason.

*******************

*Works Cited*

Gaiman, Neil 'American Gods' (2000)
Gribbin, John 'Deep Simplicity' (2004)
Hobb, Robin 'Royal Assassin' (1996)
Homer, 'The Odyssey' (Penguin Classics edition 1946)
Le Guin, Ursula K. 'A Wizard Of Earthsea' (1968)
Mieville, China 'The Scar' (2002)
Reynolds, Alastair 'Revelation Space' (1999)
Rudgley, Richard 'Secrets Of The Stone Age'
Sterling, Bruce 'Schismatrix' (1985)
Taylor, Timothy 'The Buried Soul: How Humans Invented Death' (2002)
Tolkien, J.R.R. 'The Return Of The King' (1955)


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## Parson (May 28, 2010)

> Mastery of the fear of death is  gained by enjoying life to the full. Though I know I will die, I hope  that when the time comes I will have done all that I need to do; and if I  have, then I will feel no sting. Such hope sustains me, and it can  sustain us all. It is a tragedy that so many people substitute religion  for effort and illusion for reason.


So, the greatest achievement for a life is pleasure? Experience teaches that even pleasure becomes mundane and unattractive. The logical conclusion of a philosophy like this is nihilism. 

How does an individual know that s/he has "done all that I need to do"? And for that matter if this life is all there is: Why do I need to do anything?

It is clear that a premise which states: "If I can think up other possible realities then it is logical that the prevailing view of reality is simply another creative writing." has nothing to commend it as more likely true than that there is an immortal soul.


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## nebsmith (May 28, 2010)

An interesting article, I find nothing to disagree with although I'll have to think about some of the more complex ideas.




> The bog people were deemed problematic to society. To exclude them not only from the world of the living but also from the world of the dead they were multiply killed, then cast into the liminal world. There they were neither one thing nor the other. And this gives us an important insight into the thinking of ancient people. To them, the world of the dead - the afterlife - was as real as their own world. It was not enough simply to kill a person who brought shame; that wrongdoer had to be cast out of the dark land beyond also. Death was feared. Dead people, who were thought to continue in the afterlife, were also feared.


This was particularly intriguing, I haven't come across this explanation of the bog peoples rituals before and I find it Persuasive.



> 'Prigogine showed... that a dissipative system in the linear regime settles down not into the state of death corresponding to maximum entropy (as it would be in equilibrium), but into a state where entropy is being produced as slowly as possible, and the dissipative activity is ticking over at a minimum rate... Things exist in a steady state in the linear regime; a human being, for example, can maintain his or her integrity for many years using the flow of energy (and food) through their body, although in this case the steady state eventually breaks down, for reasons which are still not understood.'


The more complex stuff that I'm going to have to go away and think about. I think I follow it but I may be deluding myself here.


I 




> Or is it alas? It is possible to trace the concept of life and death, and the parallel concept of spirit or soul, over tens of thousands of years, from our Neanderthal ancestors right up to the present day.


This reminded me of something in a book by *Parke Goodwin - Waiting For The Galactic Bus *I don't remember if it was explicitly stated in the book, but basically it goes like this.
_The first consequence of self-awareness is awareness of end of self and the only reasonable response to that realisation is laughter. A grand cosmic joke._ The origin of humour?​And I suppose without laughter the origin of religion.



> Belief in life after death cheapens life. Though it is a comforting illusion to many, it is nonetheless an illusion. Belief that living is preparation for something else leaches authenticity from life.


This is so true and unfortunately it often the life of other people - not the believer - that is cheapened. For some the stronger the belief in an afterlife the less value given to this one.



> Mastery of the fear of death is gained by enjoying life to the full. Though I know I will die, I hope that when the time comes I will have done all that I need to do; and if I have, then I will feel no sting. Such hope sustains me, and it can sustain us all. It is a tragedy that so many people substitute religion for effort and illusion for reason.


Yes! As a teenager I promised myself that I wouldn't give in to belief in later life, because of fear of death as many do. You only get the one life and this is it.
I'll just add, I wish there was something more than this life. But as you say - and I agree - there's no evidence and the unexplained is just that ,unexplained, not evidence. 
So this is it enjoy it while you can ​


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## nebsmith (May 28, 2010)

Parson said:


> So, the greatest achievement for a life is pleasure? Experience teaches that even pleasure becomes mundane and unattractive. The logical conclusion of a philosophy like this is nihilism.


I don't think I agree here there is always something new to take pleasure in. A new person, a new book, a new idea, but you may be right about were the philosophy leads. for me it hasn't yet, but with more experience, who knows.



> How does an individual know that s/he has "done all that I need to do"?


Well I suppose you can't you just have to do your best.



> And for that matter if this life is all there is: Why do I need to do anything?


 Well you don't, but I don't see it as a reason not to do anything either.



> It is clear that a premise which states: "If I can think up other possible realities then it is logical that the prevailing view of reality is simply another creative writing." has nothing to commend it as more likely true than that there is an immortal soul


True, There's no actual evidence against an immortal soul, but from my point of view there's no evidence for either. So maybe it could be argued that I have " given in to belief " contrary to what I said earlier. To the belief that this is all there is. 
I must say I do sometimes envy people who do believe in more, as I can see the comfort (if that's the right word) that they take in that belief.


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## Stephen Palmer (Jun 2, 2010)

Yep, enjoy it while you can... if you can.


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