ABSTRACT
Death is not a theme that one automatically associates with science fiction. In the popular imagination, science fiction (SF) is much likelier to be associated with the future, with the technological sublime, and with the proverbial sense of wonder that has been the genre’s stock in trade since its full emergence at the end of the nineteenth century. Granted, the SF genre has been enormously fertile in inventing motifs expressing the theme of death, from longevity and immortality to artificial life to resurrection and afterlife to mass extinction – a whole repertoire of motifs. Spectacle-driven SF, especially on the big screen, often depicts destruction on a planetary scale, implying the death of entire populations. However, mass death typically serves to motivate sublime special effects, and is taken seriously only relatively rarely. Frequently, in recent SF, human beings survive their own deaths by merging with machines.
