While tales of the dead returning to us by various arcane means have been told for millennia, it was Mary Shelley who first suggested a scientific basis to the procedure in her debut novel ‘Frankenstein’.*
Now, a recent New Scientist article describes how (low level) brain function can and has been restored, even several hours after death.
NB: this does not mean the dead person regains consciousness. Even if possible, such a thing brings with it a host of ethical issues, and has not been attempted. Yet.
There was a very old book that featured this trick, about three days was the timeline for resurrection.
It probably will depend on how ‘fractal’ consciousness is. If a strand of DNA could resurrect a mammoth from the Pleistocene, then consciousness from days or weeks ago may be possible.
I believe that scientific knowledge has fractal properties, that no matter how much we learn, whatever is left, however small it may seem, is just as infinitely complex as the whole was to start with. That, I think, is the secret of the Universe.
An interesting case is Greg Egan’s Distress which opens
“All right. He’s dead. Go ahead and talk to him."
and shortly after that
“The pathologist’s assistant sprayed a depilatory enzyme onto the victim’s skull, and then wiped all the close-cropped black hair away with a couple of sweeps of his gloved hand. As he dropped the mess into a plastic sample bag, I realized why it was holding together instead of dispersing like barber’s shop waste; several layers of skin had come with it. The assistant glued the “hairnet” – a skein of electrodes and SQID detectors – to the bare pink scalp. The pathologist finished checking the blood supply, then made an incision in the trachea and inserted a tube, hooked up to a small pump to take the place of the collapsed lungs. Nothing to do with respiration; purely as an aid to speech. It was possible to monitor the nerve impulses to the larynx, and synthesize the intended sounds by wholly electronic means, but apparently the voice was always less garbled if the victim could experience something like the normal tactile and auditory feedback produced by a vibrating column of air. The assistant fitted a padded bandage over the victim’s eyes; in rare cases, feeling could return sporadically to the skin of the face, and since retinal cells were deliberately not revived, some kind of temporary ocular injury was the easiest lie to explain away the pragmatic blindness.”
The science of this topic currently concentrates on how to restore neural function to neurons without killing (useful for eg stroke victims)
The ethical side of things is probably what TASAT is most suited for.
That is a wide field. Here, I’ll concentrate on how stories have handled the levels of resurrection.
The lowest is a simple retrieval of memory. This is the least interesting scenario, requiring only a brief description. Offhand, I can’t think of any stories that show only this.
Next is a negotiation with whatever agency remains of the deceased. A time limit is usually imposed on the conversation. Examples of this include scenes from “The Creator” (dead officer is told the situation, and ordered to report in two minutes), and the Doctor Who episodes “Silence in the Library/Forest of the Dead” (the latter being more concerned with easing passage as the personality disintegrates after death). The D&D movie “Honor Among Thieves” has an amusing, albeit magical, scene where the dead are resurrected to answer precisely five questions. What happens if you only ask four?
Things a story may consider about what has been resurrected:
Is it the original person? (eg The people resurrected by fire priests in Martin’s “Song of Ice and Fire”. Some go through this process several times, feeling increasingly ‘flatter’ each time)
Is it some other personality with memories? (eg The Vander/Warwick beast in the second season of ‘Arcane’). This scenario is often presented in terms of a predator using the gained familiarity as camouflage to get close to its prey: quite literally in the case of Gene Wolfe’s alzebo in “Sword of the Lictor” (the beast’s ability to gain memories from those it eats is also used in an interesting ritual of commemoration so that memories are imparted to others). Many vampire tales also follow this pattern.
Is it some person without memories? If so, is it possible to work with whatever personality there is to retrieve memories? (eg the Tlielaxu ‘ghola’ of Duncan Idaho in the Dune novels.)
Finally, what effect does the retrieval have upon the person? (eg the revenants in Greg Egan’s ‘Zendegi’ ask to be shut down, as the virtual reality is a pale, unsatisfactory reproduction of reality)
I haven’t read Distress, but re-reading this post, was struck by a memory of “SQID” – a term also used for a scalp-affixed brain interface in the film Strange Days.
I assumed “squid” was just slang based on it’s tentacle-y appearance, but per Wikipedia:
“SQUID (Superconducting QUantum Interference Device), an illegal electronic device that records memories and physical sensations directly from the wearer’s cerebral cortex”
Strange Days and Distress are both from 1995. I wonder, did they both draw from somewhere else, or was it parallel sci-fi imagination…?
Brainstorm (1983) had an interesting sub-plot where the cumbersome (SQUID?) helmet quickly morphed into a sleek, lightweight headset. Hard to watch though because the beautiful Natalie Wood died during production.
This one is gory, as only Banks could do it. In the opening chapter of Iain Banks “The Algebraist” we are introduced to the Archimandrite Luseferous who, “had some years ago caused the head of his once greatest-enemy, the rebel chief Stinausin, to be struck from his shoulders, attached without delay to a long term life support mechanism and then hung upside down from the ceiling of his hugely impressive study in the outer wall of Sheer Citadel - wtih it’s view of Junch City and Faraby Bay toward the hazy vertical slot that was Force Gap - so that the Archimandrite could, when the mood struck him, which was failrly frequently, use his old adversaries head as a punchball.”
