ESCHATOLOGY

   Eschatology is the class of theological doctrine pertaining to death and the subsequent fate of the soul, and to the ultimate fate of the world. Stories of the FAR FUTURE and the END OF THE WORLD can be categorized as eschatological, but are considered separately; this section deals mainly with the idea of personal survival after death.Ancient Egyptian RELIGION included an inordinately complex set of eschatological beliefs (explored in sf in Roger ZELAZNY's Creatures of Light and Darkness (1969) which influenced most subsequent eschatologies. Christian eschatology is, of course, basically dualistic, contrasting Heaven and Hell, but it has variants which are more complex, incorporating Purgatory and Limbo, and including an involved demonology. A common strategy employed by sf writers writing pure FANTASY (as for instance in the magazine UNKNOWN) is to import a judicious measure of common sense into settings derived from classical MYTHOLOGY or the Christian demonological schema, usually with comic results - although unorthodox horror stories sometimes result.The growth of the SCIENTIFIC ROMANCE in the late 19th century coincided with the growth of the Spiritualist movement. The Spiritualists popularized an eroded version of Christian eschatology with some added jargon involving the "astral plane" and like concepts. Spiritualist beliefs influenced several early sf writers, including Camille FLAMMARION and Arthur Conan DOYLE; Doyle's later works - particularly The Land of Mist (1926) and "The Maracot Deep" (in The Maracot Deep and Other Stories coll 1929) - are markedly affected. There is an abundance of Spiritualist fiction, but whether any of this can be considered sf is dubious, despite the pseudo-scientific endeavours of Johann Zollner (1834-1882), author of Transcendental Physics (1865), and other psychic theorists. The most heavily sciencefictionalized of these Spiritualist fantasies is Allen UPWARD's The Discovery of the Dead (1910), which recounts the revelations of a "necroscope". An early pulp-sf writer who dabbled in Spiritualist fiction was Ralph Milne FARLEY, as in Dangerous Love (1931; 1946). More interesting is David LINDSAY's interstellar fantasy A VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS (1920), which inverts conventional Spiritualist ideas and routine eschatological aspirations, imagining an intrinsically painful destiny.The idea that scientists might one day prove the existence of the elusive soul and build traps for it is featured in Charles B. STILSON's curious "Liberty or Death!" (1917; vt "The Soul Trap"), and is developed more ambitiously in The Weigher of Souls (1931) by Andre MAUROIS. Maurois may have borrowed his inspiration from the fantasy Spirite (1865; trans 1877) by Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), and his example inspired in its turn Romain GARY's satirical soul-trapping story The Gasp (1973), in which the inexhaustible energy of the soul is quickly exploited as an industrial resource. In all these examples, as in most stories in which people supposedly trespass on divine prerogatives, no good comes of it all. Nor does it in Maurice RENARD's Le docteur Lerne, sous-dieu (1908; trans as New Bodies for Old 1923 US), when an experiment in metempsychosis ends with the imprisonment of a person's soul in the engine of a motor car. An experiment in communication with the dead ends tragically in The Edge of Running Water (1939; vt The Unquiet Corpse) by William M. SLOANE. A curious corollary of the conviction that "there are things Man is not meant to know" is the profusion of afterlife fantasies in which characters realize only at the story's end that they have been dead since its beginning; two which transcend the banality of the plot are Ray BRADBURY's "Pillar of Fire" (1948) and Flann O'BRIEN's The Third Policeman (1967).C.S. LEWIS's theological fantasy The Great Divorce (1945) acknowledges that some of the ideas used in formulating its image of Heaven are borrowed from sf, but sf writers were slow to develop the hypothesis that future TECHNOLOGY might succeed in securing the life after death that God and Nature had failed to provide. Robert SHECKLEY's melodrama of technological REINCARNATION, Immortality Delivered (1958; exp vt Immortality, Inc. 1959), is an early example which skates lightly over the experience of disembodied existence and the question of ultimate destiny. Thomas M. DISCH's ON WINGS OF SONG (1979) features a technology which grants out-of-body experiences to almost everyone, but Disch is likewise coy about the possibility of universal life after death. A similar hesitancy is seen in the many stories which Philip Jose FARMER has devoted to eschatological matters, including Inside Outside (1964), Traitor to the Living (1973) and the Riverworld series. More ambitious and more convincing stories of technological afterlife include Robert SILVERBERG's "Born with the Dead" (1974), Lisa TUTTLE's "The Hollow Man" (1979) and Lucius SHEPARD's account of biotechnological zombies, Green Eyes (1984). Silverberg had earlier written To Live Again (1969) on a less interesting eschatological theme; here the personas of living persons are regularly "recorded" so that, after the death of the body, the most recent recording can be introduced into the mind of a host. Similar recording processes are featured - without the consequent overcrowding of skulls on which Silverberg focuses - in other stories of reincarnation, including John VARLEY's THE OPHIUCHI HOTLINE (1977) and Michael BERLYN's nasty-minded Crystal Phoenix (1980).Some writers have sciencefictionalized the Christian notion of the soul, imagining it as an alien symbiont (PARASITISM AND SYMBIOSIS) which invests living beings and survives their deaths. Clifford D. SIMAK, in Time and Again (1951; vt First He Died 1953), makes no attempt to describe the life led by such symbionts when apart from their hosts, but Bob SHAW, in The Palace of Eternity (1969), is more ambitious, equating the pseudoastral plane with the extradimensional HYPERSPACE employed by the starships to transcend Einsteinian limitations. In Deane ROMANO's Flight from Time One (1972) the astral plane is no sooner discovered by science than exploited, but the novel follows the exploits of "astralnauts" without saying anything about the spirits of the departed. Rudy RUCKER's WHITE LIGHT (1980) is much more courageous and ingenious in following the venerable example of C.H. HINTON by recruiting mathematical speculations about infinity (and Cantor's extrapolated hierarchy of infinities on infinities) to construct a metaphysics which includes an afterlife. Harlan ELLISON's "The Region Between" (1970) is a bold surreal melodrama featuring soul-predation. A particularly poignant story in which science ultimately reveals that human personalities do live on after death is Richard COWPER's "The Tithonian Factor" (1983), which considers the plight of those who have already accepted an inferior technology of IMMORTALITY. Special eschatologies are sometimes devised for individual characters: death as metamorphosis is often featured in the work of Charles L. HARNESS and the later work of Robert A. HEINLEIN, and is notable in Thomas M. DISCH's CAMP CONCENTRATION (1968). ALIENS often fare better than humans in this breed of sf, having some kind of afterlife built into their BIOLOGY; examples can be found in Poul ANDERSON's "The Martyr" (1960), George R.R. MARTIN's "A Song for Lya" (1974) and Nicholas Yermakov's The Last Communion (1981) and its sequels. Some writers have developed this line of thought on a grander scale, moving eschatological speculation to a level which takes in entire species, or even the entire Universe. Arthur C. CLARKE's CHILDHOOD'S END (1953) features the transcendent "apotheosis" of mankind's superior descendants, producing an image very similar to that evoked by the heretical Jesuit and evolutionist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955); Teilhard's ideas are overtly invoked in George ZEBROWSKI's The Omega Point Trilogy (omni 1983).Although they are not sf, mention must be made of a recent group of quasi-Dantean fantasies by sf writers. Inferno (1975) by Larry NIVEN and Jerry POURNELLE was the apparent inspiration for a series of SHARED-WORLD anthologies and novels "created" by Janet E. MORRIS, begun with Heroes in Hell (anth 1986) and The Gates of Hell (1986); Robert Silverberg's contributions featuring Gilgamesh were subsequently reassembled in To the Land of the Living (fixup 1989). A much more earnest and varied theme anthology - one of the best of its kind - is Afterlives (anth 1986) ed Pamela SARGENT and Ian WATSON, whose contributions, mostly original to the volume, range over the entire spectrum of eschatological fantasy and sf. Outstanding among the sf stories are Gregory BENFORD's "Of Space-Time and the River", Rudy Rucker's "In Frozen Time" and Watson's own "The Rooms of Paradise"; Watson is also the author of the very eschatological novel Deathhunter (1981).

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   See also: COSMOLOGY; ENTROPY; GODS AND DEMONS; METAPHYSICS.