Usually, plots are populated by the alive or alive-adjacent. (I was going to say “alive and breathing,” but then I remembered that some vampire characters don’t breathe.) Nothing facilitates plot like living people. Most corpses are poor conversationalists and don’t do much besides just lie there. Hence most authors choose to populate their books with the living.
As always, there are exceptions. A few fictional corpses are very interesting. Take, for example, these five dead people…
Inherit the Stars by James P. Hogan (1977)
Charlie is an enigma: a human corpse found in a cave on the Moon. A missing man should be easy to identify, given how few humans have made it out into space. Inexplicably, all of them can be accounted for. So who is the dead man?
Detailed investigation compounds the mystery. Radioisotopes establish beyond the shadow of doubt that Charlie has been interred on the Moon for fifty thousand years. Fifty thousand years ago, Earth’s native population was Stone Age, not Space Age. They couldn’t have crafted Charlie’s kit, let alone sent him to the Moon. That human origins are terrestrial is indisputable, backed up by basic morphology and hundreds of millions of years of fossil evidence. Yet somehow Charlie died on an airless world, cloaked in a space suit made with tech that is as good or better than the best the 21st century could produce. The facts are indisputable. But how on earth to reconcile irreconcilable facts?
***
Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams (1987)
Etienne Steward wasted his life. Feckless veteran of a disastrous extra-solar war and two divorces, he didn’t even bother to keep his memory records up to date. Thus, when Etienne’s past caught up with him, his clone—Etienne Mark II—woke with memories fifteen years out of date. Someone in the original Etienne’s past saw the need to brutally murder the mercenary. The current Etienne has absolutely no idea who the killer was or what the motive might have been. Nevertheless, the clone feels duty-bound to resolve his predecessor’s unfinished business, despite his total ignorance about what business might have been. It’s an Actor’s Nightmare whose payoff might be a grave.
***
The Kingdom of the Gods by Kim Eun-hee and Kim Seong-hun (2019)
Scurrilous posters claim that the king of Great Joseon is dead. If true, Prince Yi Chang, crown prince of Great Joseon, should ascend the throne. But the crown prince’s stepmother, Queen Consort Yo, and her powerful clan insist that the king is not dead. Further, they accuse the crown prince of spreading the seditious rumor. Justice demands that he be executed for undermining the authority of the rightful king (and, of course, for resisting the Haewon Cho clan).
There is some truth on both sides. The Prince is indeed conspiring and the king does have a mild case of death. Or rather, he had a mild case of death. Faced with the prospect of losing power if the king were replaced by Yi Chang, the Queen Consort and her allies resorted to extreme measures to revivify the monarch.
Whether the king could be said to be alive is an interesting question. He is most certainly animated. Furthermore, he is extremely dangerous to anyone unlucky enough to come close to him. Not only that, his semi-dead condition is contagious. The Haewon Clan may be able to suppress the truth. They have not, however, contained the plague, as Great Joseon will learn to its cost.
***
Ward Against Death by Melanie Card (2011)
Ward De’Ath could have been a perfectly respectable necromancer. Instead, his interest in forbidden surgical arts left him a branded pariah. He’s reduced to scrabbling for jobs, such as his latest: temporarily raising the late Celia Carlyle long enough that she can say goodbye to her family, He discovers he has resurrected a murder victim who would very much like her murder solved. A murder victim who drags the necromancer along like a living battery (he has to periodically refresh his spells) for as long as it takes Celia to crack the case.
***
Ninefox Gambit by Yoon Ha Lee (2016)
The Fortress of Scattered Needles has fallen into the hands of rebels. The hexarchate is determined to have it back. The fortress is impregnable to conventional attacks. Commander Shuos Jedao would be the ideal person to retake the fortress, being both brilliant and innovative. Too bad that he’s dead, which is usually a disqualification for leadership roles.
However, Jedao is only mostly dead. His essence could be decanted into the unfortunate Captain Kel Cheris, there to advise her on ways to reconquer the fortress. Victory is expected. It is also certain that victory will be followed by the swift demise of Cheris and Jedao. The empire had executed Jedao for good reason. He cannot be allowed to offend again.
***
Have I overlooked examples even more apropos than the ones above? Well, the comments are below: post away!
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
The Brucolac in China Mieville’s The Scar is a marvelously charismatic character, for all that he’s outshined by Uther Doul. But every character everywhere is outshined by Uther Doul.
Augh, I forgot Glen Cook’s Dead Man, whose species takes a very long time to stop being active after they die. This one is essentially cosplaying Nero Wolfe.
Just assumed Gideon the Ninth would get a call out here.
In Peter S. Beagle’s first novel A Fine and Private Place, dead play a prominent part, in a beautiful non-scary way. Highly recommended!
Oooh, love Cook’s dead loghir!
Dan Simmons, Hyperion, Part Five, The Detective’s Tale: “The Long Good-Bye”. A devastatingly good-looking blond shows up in a private detective’s office to ask her to solve his murder…ish. (I know some French word endings, like the difference between blond and blonde.)
John Varley’s “The Phantom of Kansas”. I have a niggling notion that he’s done more along the same lines, but the details aren’t coming to me.
In The Ophiuchi Hotline, the protagonist has a talent for dying.
Hari Seldon drives much of the plot in the original Foundation trilogy, despite being very dead.
To paraphrase the movie Soapdish (1991): “Actors don’t like to play dead. They feel it limits their range.”
On top of everything else, Voice of the Whirlwind is a meditation on the difference experience makes in a person’s life. What Etienne Steward Mark I went through and what he became is pretty horrible and Mark II has a tough time coming to terms with it. And the story leaves us with the hope that Etienne Steward Mark III is finally going to get it right.
I do love that book.
Count Sessine, in Iain M. Banks’s Feersum Endjinn, is killed something like nine times before he decides to do something about it.
In Philip K. Dick’s Ubik the dead can be woken and chatted with, but something is going wrong.
In Farmer’s To Your Scattered Bodies Go, everyone is dead. They just got better.
I thought of Ray Bradbury’s Homecoming. A family of mostly dead/undead, with one mortal child.
Of course there’s everyone’s favorite ‘hyperactive little git’- Miles Vorkosigan.
See also Daniel Jose Older’s “Bone Street Rumba” trilogy, about Carlos Delacruz, an “inbetweener;” that is, he’s dead but sort of resurrected as an agent of the New York Council of the Dead to act on their behalf in dealing with the “unquiet” dead and their conflicts with the living.
I’ll just mention Niven & Pournelle’s Inferno, in which the story begins after the protagonist commits suicide.
@16: Carpentier’s death was what coroners in the UK would call ‘death by misadventure’.
How about “Love Minus Eighty” by Will McIntosh ?
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00A4H1W9M/
Who was it in A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, that was spending a year dead for tax purposes?
Tanith Lee’s Biting the Sun.
https://www.tor.com/2008/09/12/jang/
And “The World of the End” by Ofir Touché Gafla
https://www.amazon.com/World-End-Ofir-Touch%C3%A9-Gafla/dp/0765333570
Iain Bank’s awesome Culture novel Surface Detail part of which is about the “War in Heaven” about a simulated war to determine the outcome of virtual “Hells” of various alien cultures.
@19,
Hotblack Desioto, the lead performer of the band Disaster Area. He was named after a real estate company in the UK.
Reg Shoe, from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, is very much dead, but he isn’t taking it lying down.
Kind of dead people? The Riddle-Master of Hed, etc.(whatever you want to call that trilogy), by Patricia A. McKillip, and the harpist Deth.
Justin Leiber’s Beyond Rejection begins similar to the aforementioned Voice of the Whirlwind with a deceased man downloaded into a new body. The catch is, the new body has a tail. And it had belonged to a woman. Much of the story is spent inside the persons head as they get therapy to become used to their changed circumstances. There are two additional volumes (Beyond Humanity, Beyond Gravity) which explore what having a body means in the context of humans and aliens living and working together.
@25: He’s not dead, he’s just drawn that way.
The ultimate book about a corpse has to be James K Morrow’s Towing Jehovah. Since I only commented on the last post to complain about a cover, I’ll make up for it by saying that Inherit The Stars cover is one of the best I’ve ever seen. An accurate depiction of a scene from the book, and a good representation of the premise.
Ugh, “Inherit the Stars” sounds fantastic, and it’s essentially unavailable, unless you want to pay a ridiculous amount of money to an Amazon algorithm. :/
Terry Pratchett’s “Reaper Man” had Death, who is retired, and a wizard who is dead yet still active, much to the consternation of himself and his colleagues.
I believe it is in this omnibus.
https://www.amazon.com/Two-Moons-Giants-Star-Book-ebook/dp/B00AP9D7DS/ref=mp_s_a_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=inherit+the+stars+by+james+p.+hogan&qid=1603241688&sprefix=inherit+the+s&sr=8-2
Isfdb.org is handy for tracking down recent editions of older works.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/title.cgi?1712
Many thanks for this piece, James! One story that comes to my mind is Robert Silverberg’s memorable novella “Born with the Dead.”
@4 I thought of A Fine and Private Place too, but then I had second thoughts. AFaPP is a wonderful novel, and the post-death characters do make it technically fantasy, but it’s set in a contemporary (as of the time it was written) American city. In a lot of ways it’s more of a ghost story (and a romance) than a fantasy. It’s very different from some of the other books mentioned here.
@29. Bookfinder shows some copies starting at C$26.- Not great, but not silly money either.
At least you wouldn’t necessarily be paying the Big River Company.
I can’t belive nobody’s mentioned Five Fates, in which Laumer, Ellison, Anderson, Herbert, and Dickson each begin a story right after the introduction, where the main protagonist dies in a suicide parlor.
ISFDB suggests that Voice of the Whirlwind is a sequel to Hardwired. Is this true or are they just set in the same universe?
Harry Dresden spends a book or so being dead (not that he’s the most famous wizard named Harry to kind of die and live again, as he would probably point out, but points for staying that way for a whole book…)
Although not the main character, Sethra Lavode is important, and dead in the Vlad Taltos books. There’s lots of dying and revivification as well as reincarnation in that series.
Neil Gaiman: “The Graveyard Book”
Jan Siegel: “The Dragon-Charmer”
“Inherit the Starts” is a well-done hard SF book, and the two sequels are decent. There’s a 4th book which was pretty weird. Sort of a hard-sf/cyberpunk combination. Come to think of it, Jo Walton’s(IIRC) idea of “homeopathically bad”, where the goodness in the first books gets continually diluted in follow-on books, may apply.
A non-SF movie built around a dead character is Alfred Hitchcock’s romantic-comedy “The Trouble with Harry”. The trouble with Harry being that he’s dead.
Inherit the Stars is (was?) available as a standalone ebook; I’m not sure where I got it from (I think it might have been Phoenix Pick/Arc Manor but it’s not available there now).
37: same continuity, otherwise unrelated.
Would the undead qualify as dead? Sethra Lavode from the Vlad Taltos novels comes to mind.
She’s not the center of the series (Vlad is), but she is central enough to… OK, I’ll stop here.
@@@@@ 39: I HATE you! ;-)
Did not read your comment before posting.
@Ashgrove: that’s okay, you can’t overdo the appreciation when it comes to Sethra Lavode.
And Bujold’s already been mentioned, so I’ll add Padadin of Souls, which has a dead guy in a fairly prominent role.
There’s also Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life; the protagonist dies a lot in that one.
41: I probably should have warned readers new to Hogan that significant diminishing returns set in around the time he left Del Rey Books for other imprints, driven by his swerve into … looking for a phrase that won’t irk our hosts … crank science and history. He started off denouncing cranks and con-men, but by the end of his career fully embraced Velikovskiism, HIV-denial, and Holocaust denial (although I am unaware of that last making it into his books, he wrote at least one book around the first). The joke 20 years ago was that he was not Y2K compatible, although in fact one can trace the change back to a specific period in the 1980s.
But Inherit the Stars is a nice puzzle story where in the end all the seemingly contradictory evidence makes sense in the context of the proper model. It’s antithetical to his later work.
In all fairness Velikovsky’s World in Collision would make great science fiction.
48: Please don’t let this thesis tempt you reading Cradle of Saturn.
Velikovsky – wow, blast from the past. Haven’t even thought about this for nearly 40 years. I’m inspired – perhaps we should add Jonathan Livingston Seagull to this list.
Thomas M Disch’s greatly underrated The Businessman: A Tale of Terror deserves a mention here.
@47 it’s a nice puzzle solution, but it does rely on some very, um, Velikovskian celestial mechanics. You can see the thoughtlines leading from it to his later beliefs…
Don’t forget “A Memory Called Empire” by Arkady Martine. The plot centers around a dead ambassador – the same ambassador whose memories and personality have been downloaded into his successor (from an earlier point in his timeline, natch.) So the successor and the (ghost? symbiont? partner?) must solve the original ambassador’s murder, with a dangerous lack of information. (GREAT worldbuilding, complex politics, and anti-colonialist leanings. Can’t wait for the next one.)
I once read a review of Kate Elliott’s _Spirit Gate_ that lamented the fact that she killed off a very interesting character in the prologue. Too bad the reviewer didn’t make it as far as the *second* book, _Shadow Gate_, which starts with “Marit was pretty sure she had been murdered.” Dead, yes; out of the story, very much no. The series has a large cast, several of which are dead.
_Paladin of Souls_ does have a fairly important dead guy, but the third book in that universe, _The Hallowed Hunt_, has an even more central and plot-driving dead guy.
A major character in _Mirror Dance_ is dead for part of the book (he manages to be killed in action and missing in action in the same action), and a not-quite-as-major character is memorably described as “wearing a corpse”, although it’s debatable who is truly dead in that case.
How dead is an ancillary? “Wearing a corpse” seems to sum them up pretty well too, and IIRC they are even referred to in universe as “corpse soldiers” by some people who are not fans of the concept.
@52
Yeah, later in the series he modifies the orbital mechanics of that solution via convenient manufactured gravitational space anomalies.
Mayflies by Kevin O’Donnell begins with the protagonist being decapitated. He reminds the world that mostly dead is partly alive.
@29 Abebooks is a good market for independent booksellers. I see used copies of Inherit The Stars going pretty cheap there. (Or if you are philosophically opposed to buying used books, there are new ones too.)
https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?cm_sp=SearchFwi-_-SRP-_-Results&kn=Hogan&sortby=17&tn=Inherit%20the%20Stars
What about Brandon Sanderson’s “Elantris”? The elantrians aren’t quite dead, but as good as…
We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor has the main character die in the first chapter, only to come back as an AI “replicant” to go explore the stars, save humanity, etc. Similar starting point to the short story Rammer by Larry Niven, and it’s full novel extension, A World Out of Time (which also fits this list).
In Zelazny’s The Changing Land there’s a character who was dead and in Hell, but has returned to the world.
@57 Abebooks is owned by Amazon I believe. Biblio.com purports to be an independent site and has quite a few copies starting at a bit over US $13.00
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. Gordon Way becomes a ghost. But is he the only one? My favorite book from this amazing author is also a ghost story of sorts.
@61 I was under the impression that Alibris was the entity owned by Amazon.
Thanks for reminding me about “Inherit the Stars”. I remember it being a truly clever and satisfying puzzle. Now I just have to dig out my old copy. Big job! With decades to mostly forget the twists, I should be able to recover that “first read” enjoyment.
Passage by Connie Willis: a main character dies but their story goes on.
“Her Smoke Rose Up Forever” by James Tiptree, Jr. Death is no escape from the horror of human nature.
What about Taylor Bloc in Neal Asher’s “The Voyage of the Sable Keech”. He was dead all the way through and still managed to murder a few more people!
Inherit the stars available on both Open Library AND Internet Archive.
And my library..Auckland City..has it as an audiobook
!!!
The Skullduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy is by FAR the best!
In the category of “qualifies in name”, there’s Zane from On a Pale Horse by Piers Anthony from the Incarnations of Immortality series. I haven’t read it in a long time, but I recall that Zane’s role has handled quite interestingly compared to its archetype.
If decanted personalities count as “dead” there’s also: I Will Fear No Evil by Robert A. Heinlein in which the brain of a brain transplant discovers his new body wasn’t as vacant as he expected and To Live Again by Robert Silverberg in which getting some celebrity’s essence decanted into you is a status symbol, but sometimes they can take you over.
The Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer?
The Night’s Dawn Trilogy by Peter F. Hamilton
Kill the Dead by Tanith Lee A personal favorite.
30: Discworld and Death, yes.
40: Ooh, ‘The Graveyard Book’ – love that one.
46: ‘Paladin of Souls’ – good one. I haven’t read ‘The Hallowed Hunt’ yet.
69: There it is. ‘Skullduggery Pleasant’ is my son’s favourite series. Skullduggery is a paranormal detective who’s also a skeleton – except that he doesn’t have his own … er … skull.
One could argue that a couple of characters in Alistair Reynold’s Revelation Space are dead along with one who is most certainly dead.
If we stray into straight fantasy, there are a few dead characters who show up in Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen. Also, Brandon Sanderson’s Warbreaker features a number of people who’ve died as central characters, as do other parts of his Cosmere.
I’m shocked that nobody has thought of “I Will Fear no Evil” by Heinlein. Not my favourite Heinlein by a long shot, but still centred around one person who’s definitely dead and a second who could be technically described as such (and a third definitely dead character joins them later).
A couple of books in the “Three Parts Dead” series by Max Gladstone put the Deathless Kings front and centre. Technically, they might not yet be dead, but the oldest of them are skeletons, and they’ve all stopped breathing.
The Second Trip, by Robert Silverberg. Another we-have-a-spare-body story, in this case because the person in question was a very bad criminal, and society has a way to erase the original mind and build a new one. So, not quite a death penalty.
Unfortunately, the erasure was incomplete, the original personality was a great artist, and the new personality is trying to justify his existence to himself, never mind the one or two people who would like having another Great Artwork for themselves.
What about Kiln People by David Brin – many of the characters are modern day golums – are they alive or dead?
The Last Legends of Earth (AA Attanasio) starts billions of years after humanity’s extinction. I adore the book. It sounds so pulpy but is so beautifully written and put together that I re-read it every few years.
@@@@@ 25, sraun:
Kind of dead people? The Riddle-Master of Hed, etc.(whatever you want to call that trilogy), by Patricia A. McKillip, and the harpist Deth.
Kind of deader people: Soldiers reported fighting men they had previously killed.
In David Drake’s Old Nathan, Bully Ransden played antagonist to Old Nathan Ridgeway.
In the end Nathan had to fight Chance Ransden, Bully’s long dead father, to Save the Day.
http://baencd.freedoors.org/Books/Old%20Nathan/Old_Nathan.htm
All the movie versions of The Mummy feature someone not only long dead, but mummified to boot.
In R. J. Ortiga’s Summerland Rentals, the newly dead protagonist finds himself in a between-birth bardo.
This link is to an issue that is no longer available. But it will give you a clue.
| Grantville Gazette, Volume 30, 1 Jul 2010 | Universe Annex | by R. Ortega
The Hereafter Bytes by Vincent Scott. I just started it and it looks to be pretty amusing. The protagonist is a courier in a pretty grim future who dies and gets uploaded. Hijinks ensue.
Never have I been more excited to own a copy of Inherit the Stars than now. I enjoyed the story and the mystery. And I agree with @28 – cover art depicts a scene right out of the book, which is a refreshing change of pace with modern covers. I am tempted to add Nick Harkaway’s The Gone Away World to the list, but it has been so long since I’ve read it, I can’t actually remember what state the main character is in…. Read it for yourself!
The TV series Dead Like Me, where the main characters are all dead
Three stories turned movies, four ghosts.
Topper
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
The Canterville Ghost
Didn’t see anyone mention Stephenson’s latest – Fall; or, Dodge in Hell. Majority of the book focuses on the artificial afterlife of people who were brain scanned posthumously.