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Are there any rational stories where the afterlife is proven to exist?
Post:
Seeing as the anti-Death sentiment is such a large part of the stories I've seen presented around here, I was wondering how such a philosophy would fare in a setting where life after death was a known and proven fact. Perhaps a rational story set in a horror film/universe, where ghosts are a known hazard and the protagonist plans to weaponize their own afterlife against some foe in a kind of extreme Pyrrhic victory? Or an HPMOR clone/fic where Dumbledore actually is able to prove the existence of the afterlife to Harry?
Is there anything like that kicking around?
Comments:
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u/CeruleanTresses:
Check out[ Unsounded.](http://www.casualvillain.com/Unsounded/comic/ch01/ch01_01.html) It's a webcomic with an established afterlife that follows consistent rules (though some of its details are still unknown and hotly debated among the setting's religions), and which is exploited for research purposes and in the setting's "technology." The setting also has an equally consistent magic system that functions analogously to computer programming languages, and which characters use in creative and intelligent ways. As far as Unsounded's relevance to this community goes, it has some pretty cool transhumanist/immortalist themes (coming back to the anti-death sentiment you mentioned). I wouldn't say that the narrative itself takes an anti-death stance; however, there are multiple characters who espouse those ideals, a canonical religion based around a rejection of the cruelties and indignities of mortality (including death and particularly the humiliation of physical decay), and an organization of hardcore scientists seeking to advance humanity, and the story doesn't appear to pass any kind of automatic moral value judgment on these things the way a lot of fiction does. The characters who are part of these organizations and believe in these ideals run the gamut, ethically speaking. And in fact, the idea of "overcoming death" increasingly seems to be critical to the plot and the driving motive of certain major characters, although exactly where the story will take this is still unclear. (There is also attention given to the component of the afterlife that involves immense suffering, a la Unsong.) Aside from the ways in which its content is of interest to r/rational, the comic is *very* good. It is well-drawn, the characters and world are detailed and carefully crafted, it is updated on a reliable schedule, and the author puts a lot of thought into the structure and pacing of the story (which shows). I think its excellence is at least partly due to the author's habit of maintaining a large buffer, so that she can map out and tweak entire scenes in advance instead of rushing to post each page as it comes due.-
u/Pluvialis:
Reading it now. The girl is annoying, but I get the idea she's supposed to be. Weird typo though: >[Don't be afraid have me!](http://imgur.com/3StLNt6)-
u/noggin-scratcher:
I guess that's the inevitable logical counterpart to all the times people have written "would of" instead of "would've". -
u/CeruleanTresses:
Yes, I'd agree that the annoyingness is intentional. Stuff like "afraid've" is just written dialect. Sette says "afraid've" because that's how she pronounces "afraid of." -
u/TheAtomicOption:
"don't be afraid *have* me" that girl is thirsty
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u/monkyyy0:
Oi you seem to have left out an important detail; its unfinished; high praise and a copyright date form 7 years ago I would have thought my ways are safe. BUT NOOOO IVE FALLEN INTO WEEKLY UPDATES TRAP AGAIN -
u/TheConstipatedPepsi:
Is the first chapter representative of the whole story? I hate that little girl more than I've hated any character in a long time-
u/CeruleanTresses:
A lot of people feel that way, understandably. But no, it gets much darker than that and goes much more deeply into the cool magic system and worldbuilding stuff, and explores many other characters, and Sette undergoes enough character development to not remain completely insufferable. -
u/paradcx:
Indeed, almost made it through 2 chapters before I had to give up.-
u/CeruleanTresses:
If the only thing bothering you is that you don't like Sette, I really recommend that you keep going--at least through chapter 5, which delves into the magic system. She isn't omnipresent, there's a *ton* of cool stuff in Unsounded that doesn't involve her, and even when she's onscreen the story files the roughest edges off her brattiness pretty quickly. Once she starts seeing Duane as a person and not just a tool--and once you have some insight into her motivations beyond "steal everything in sight"--she becomes much more endearing. You stop noticing the thieves' cant after a little while too. If the story's not for you for other reasons, then fair enough. But I think it's a real shame when people drop the comic just because early-chapter Sette is annoying.- u/paradcx:
Hmm, perhaps I'll take another look later then.
- u/paradcx:
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u/_stoodfarback:
Not exactly what you're asking for, but somewhat related and very very good. - [Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang](http://will.tip.dhappy.org/blog/Porn%20Recommender/.../book/Ted%20Chiang%20-%20Hell%20Is%20The%20Absence%20Of%20God/) - [Seventy-Two Letters by Ted Chiang](https://web.archive.org/web/20010802144026/http://www.tor.com/72ltrs.html)-
u/MagicWeasel:
Hell is the Absence of God is a masterpiece. If you read nothing else, read this.-
u/Frommerman:
Holy fuck.-
u/MagicWeasel:
That was more or less my response on reading it. I have the short story collection it's in, and the author's notes [said that](#s "he thought the book of job was a cop-out because its message was about loving god despite bad things happening, but job ended up getting all his stuff back which was kind of a crock, so he wanted to DO IT PROPERLY and by gum he did")- u/Frommerman:
Yeah, my first impression was "this is a God who needs to be killed."
- u/Frommerman:
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u/None:
"I am going to fucking kill God." And a voice spaketh unto me from the heavens, and said, #+++COME AT ME ALREADY+++
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u/Evan_Th:
>Or an HPMOR clone/fic It isn't Dumbledore that does it, but look at the chilling [Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Zombie](https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10023949/1/Harry-Potter-and-the-Philosopher-s-Zombie), previously [discussed here](https://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/comments/1v9qne/harry_potter_and_the_philosophers_zombie_an_hpmor/).-
u/callmebrotherg:
I would *love* a story that took that premise and ran with it. -
u/ArgentStonecutter:
Came here to suggest exactly that story.
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u/The_Dar:
Have you read Unsong?-
u/ArgentStonecutter:
I would call Unsong alt-rational, or meta-rational. Someone pointed out that its main purpose is to give the author the opportunity to make the worst possible puns with a straight face.- u/Frommerman:
A good and noble task which it dutifully carries out to the last.
- u/Frommerman:
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u/None:
[deleted]- u/ArgentStonecutter:
> Dante's-Inferno-Style heaven and hell exists, and begin invading the world in an attempt to start a biblical apocalypse... And we fight back. I'd say that Niven and Pournelle's _Inferno_ is a pretty rational approach to this. They kind of spoiled it in the sequel _Escape from Hell_ but you don't need to read that... the first book stands on its own.
- u/ArgentStonecutter:
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u/Iconochasm:
This isn't super relevant to your request, but you did make me think of it, and it's the sort of anecdote that I think enough people here would appreciate to be worth sharing. So, one of my favorite TTRPG systems is Legend of the Five Rings, which is a sort of pan-Asian-but-mostly-Japanese fantasy setting where the intricately detailed, socially repressive setting is one of the main selling points. A decade or so ago, a supplement was commissioned for the Shadowlands faction[1] called Bearers of Jade. An adventure module was written for inclusion called [Mirror, Mirror](http://www.kazenoshiro.com/forge/4/Adventure-%20Mirror,%20Mirror.pdf), but it was ultimately rejected. The preface to the adventure explains the reason why, and I'd like to quote a chunk here: >Because creating horror in Rokugan is a different dance than trying it in GURPS Horror or Call of Cthulhu. If everyone is in character (which we are assuming in an otherwise functional game) you aren't trying to scare reporters and debutantes. That's easy. In L5R horror, you have to scare six hard-core, heavily armed martial artists, some of whom come from an entire clan of professional demon hunters **who do not fear death because they know for a fact they will reincarnate.** So we wrote an adventure that did. We sent it in to Alderac Entertainment Group. It was rejected. Why? Well, as D.J. Trindle, the line editor of L5R, put it: "You guys cranked this up to 11..." "I got chills reading it..." "You're not supposed to scare the GM." Bolded for emphasis. One of the things I like about L5R is that it makes reasonably rational use of the known-fact afterlife system. In one famous incident during the Battle At Volturnum, a fight over a gate to the afterlife realms, an entire legion commits mass suicide as a form of tactical teleportation, so they can emerge back through the gate as part of a pincer attack. The setting is filled with dozens and dozens of heroic last stands and noble self-sacrifices, all of which makes perfect sense because there is absolutely no ambiguity about the presence of an afterlife, and doing that sort of thing vastly increases your chances of a good-to-awesome one. It also makes the occasional self-sacrifice of *honor*, where doing the "right" thing gets you a *shitty* afterlife due to the intense face/standing socio-religious rules, particularly poignant (this was a main element of the Scorpion Clan, my personal favorite). I would never say the setting/story itself was rational, but this one element was consistently well done by rational fiction standards. [1] Going into the Shadowlands was once described thusly: Imagine going to hunt xenomorphs. Except the xenos live in the Chernobyl 3 reactor. And the facehuggers are invisible. And the xenos worship Cthulhu. But Cthulhu isn't a distant, uncaring god. He hates you and your family, personally, with all the venom of a thousand years of rejection and imprisonment. Doing horror in L5R is fun precisely because the stakes are so much higher than a normal horror game. -
u/EliezerYudkowsky:
The old classics would be the *Immortality Inc* stories by Robert Sheckley.- u/ArgentStonecutter:
Thanks. I have to re-read those now... it's been too long. Also _The Haunted Earth_ by Koontz, which is rational in the way a good legitimate detective story has to be.
- u/ArgentStonecutter:
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u/ArgentStonecutter:
[One of Larry Niven's Chirpsithra stories ](#s "explains why the Chirpsithra ban study of religion: they ran into a race that was studying the afterlife scientifically... and one year the entire race committed suicide. And so do scientists who spend to much time studying them. They finally destroyed all the records they could find and quarantined their planets.") -
u/PeridexisErrant:
I'd actually plug the *Young Wizards* series for having an unusual perspective on this. Cosmologically, the story begins when the Lone Power invents death/entropy/endings/badness, and throws a tantrum when nobody is impressed. Literally the entire rest of the history of the multiverse is either the story of the *redemption* of That One and its works. So there is an afterlife, and it's much like this one but better (including the afterlife, recursively) - but what you do here matters too, so it's life that gives meaning to death. Pursuit of immortality is only a bad thing if you neglect the kind of life you're trying to extend, and death is a bitter parting but not forever. If I could pick any universe to live in, it would be this one - (eventual) happy ~~ending~~ continuation guaranteed.-
u/None:
Just want to pipe up, to say that Young Wizards is amazing.- u/PeridexisErrant:
Join us at /r/errantry!
- u/PeridexisErrant:
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u/silver7017:
The novel "The Terminal Experiment" by Robert J. Sawyer. It may not be up to the standards expected of rational fiction, but not for lack of trying. Opens with a researcher accidentally identifying a "soul" of sorts while working on mind uploading. The writer isn't exactly known for his flowing prose, but I personally like it (as well as his other stories). -
u/MoralRelativity:
One of Iain M. Banks' *Culture* novels, Surface Detail, deals with this theme in an interesting way - Hells literally exist.- u/ArgentStonecutter:
As someone notes below, upload afterlives may not count... but _Surface Detail_ does a good job of it. Also _Look to Windward_, where we find that the people in charge of the Chelgrian technological afterlife are awful. Never was able to really picture the Chelgrians, that mid-limb arrangement is really weird.
- u/ArgentStonecutter:
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u/everything-narrative:
[Floornight](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2372021/chapters/5238359) has the entire premise built on the existence of Souls, and [the endgame goal is ](#s "to establish a pleasant afterlife, rather than the eternal sensory-deprived torture that awaits most souls.")