Wednesday 3 May 2017

Resurrection

Death and resurrection is a major theme in mythology and also in fiction although, in realistic fiction, the character only appears to have been dead. Classic examples are Sherlock Holmes and James Bond. Stieg Larsson's Lisbeth Salander even survives being shot in the head and buried.

I mention this theme here because I did not think that it is prominent in Poul Anderson's works? However, I have not read Anderson's entire canon and am always interested in what blog readers might be able to contribute. The Time Patrol is discussed in the article linked above.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think the closest we come to seeing Poul Anderson discussing resurrection in the Christian sense was in his "A Chapter Of Revelation." Because PA had one of the characters in that story discussing the either/or challenged posed by St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.12-19 in terms making me think he considered it very important.

Some readers might have suggested the "resurrections" we see in Anderson's later books, beginning with the last part of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS. I mean speculations about downloading human personalities into computerized matrices or uploading them into new bodies, whether artificial or made from cloned human flesh. But that would be more like a "transmigration" of souls than a "resurrection."

Sean