Person:

Burt, Stephanie

Science fiction (SF) is, and has been since its inception as a self-conscious genre, centrally and persistently interested in presenting some version of or figure for an afterlife, some way to survive the death of the body, some place where our consciousness might live on after we die. We can find representations of an afterlife within every period of SF properly so-called, from late-nineteenth-century “scientific romance” to Campbellian magazine fiction, to the New Wave of the 1960s, to the present day; within every subgenre specific to SF (time travel, space opera, postapocalyptic fiction, first contact story, and so on); and within the works of most, if not all, its influential writers. We can find these representations as aspects of setting, character, and plot, and as persistent figures and symbols, not everywhere, but very frequently, in SF, once we start to look. In saying so, I offer not a new definition, nor a new general theory of how SF works, but rather a distinctive, persistent feature to explore and explain.1 SF's persistent afterlives admit several overlapping explanations: for one thing, SF is the literature of the future, and it cannot help coming up with symbols for its own habit of imagining what will happen after we die. For another thing, SF's string of symbols for the afterlife enables the genre to reflect on itself: they present it as a means of escape (from this life, from the constraints of the real) and as a way to reflect on why we tell stories. Above all, though, the wealth of ways in which SF represents the afterlife casts new light on the relations between SF and religious faith.2 The pervasive presence of life after death in SF calls into further question the already controversial claims (the best-known is Darko Suvin's) that …