Death is Dead! Long Live Death!
©2010 Alicique (Used with permission)
Everybody dies.
Of course, in fiction they don’t always stay dead. We have zombies and messiahs and ghosts, oh my. Not to mention unaccountably lucky heroes and serial killers. In reality, death as a temporary setback would wreak havoc with the natural order, but in stories, decease isn’t necessarily ‘The End’.
Death is also awash in myths and rituals, some bland and some extravagant. What are your favorite examples from life and fiction?
Aside from resurrection, what other death tropes are popular? What strange and interesting things have writers done with death? What do you think are the best and worst deaths in science fiction and fantasy in particular? What are you sick of reading about death, and what about death would you like to read more of?
I’ve noticed that a number of science-fiction stories have some characters “Ascend to a higher plane of existence”, most notably Daniel Jackson in Stargate SG-1 (the time he stayed dead for a whole season).
Also TVTropes has a rather long index of Death Tropes: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DeathTropes
A common idea seems to be that time is not linear and hence death isn’t the “end” of anything. Many stories utilize the idea that all things happen at the same moment and the “march of time” is just an appearance. Often, it’s used as a way to explain the concept of time-travel.
In any case, were this accurate, death would be an event, but not the end of anything, just another moment…and the deceased could simply chose to look at a different moment, de facto returning to life none the worse.
So it goes.
The Greeks, despite the Christian overlay, still think of the time after death as the barren dark described in the Oddyssey (which Ursula Le Guin adopted for her Earthsea cycle before giving it a happy resolution in The Other Wind) and they often personify Death as a rival warrior who will win but must be opposed for the sake of honor (which Poul Anderson modified as The Hunter for his Ythrians).
Craig, that reminds me a bit of Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.