Science fiction is, and has been since its inception as a self-conscious genre, centrally and persistently interested in presenting some version or some 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 science fiction properly so-called, from late 19th century "scientific romance" to Campbellian magazine fiction, to the New Wave of the 1960s, to the present day; within every subgenre specific to science fiction (time travel, space opera, post-apocalyptic fiction, first contact story, etc.); 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 science fiction 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 sf, as a genre, must favor the rational, or the empirical. At the same time, that presence supports recent claims (such as those by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.) about the variety of imaginative powers that science fiction can contain.Once we see the persistence of ideas about the afterlife through twentieth and twenty-first century science fiction, we can recognize nineteenth-century fictions and suppositions about the afterlife among science fiction's progenitors. The persistence of 2 the afterlife within sf shows how much we readers, past and present, want to imagine some version of life after death. If we do not find or accept it in revealed religion, we may look for it-as so many earlier Americans did-within the precincts of the empirically verifiable; and if we do not find it there either, then we may seek it, and go on seeking it, in science fiction, bolstered by sf's peculiar powers to project a future imagined as comprehensible, yet characterized by forms of life that we do not know. If science (however understood) cannot provide the desiderata of faith, then science fiction-under erasure, or faute de mieux-might; and none of those desiderata have seemed more contested, more subject to proof or disproof, in the late nineteenth,...
