The Nothing After Death: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|Every day I'm dead a little longer, [[The Engineer|Mister Conagher]]. I have ''seen'' the other side. There is ''nothing'' there.|'''Blutarch Mann''', ''[[Team Fortress 2]]''}}

 

** ''Inferno'', a book by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle as a 20th century update has the protagonist stuck in his own pocket universe of nothingness after death until he finally breaks down and calls out to God to rescue him.

* ''[[Neverwhere]]'': When asked what death is like, {{spoiler|the Marquis de Carabas}} says "It's very cold, my friend. Very dark and very cold."

* He also offers a more nightmarish subversion in ''[[The Space Trilogy|Perelandra]]'': {{spoiler|Weston}} becomes [[Demonic Possession|possessed]] by Earth's [[Genius Loci|Oyarsa]] ([[Satan]]) and subsequently becomes an [[Our Zombies Are Different|animated corpse]]. Towards the climax, {{spoiler|Weston}} resurfaces, apparently having experienced damnation. His description matches this trope, but Ransom also infers the added twist that the damned ''all eventually merge with Satan for eternity''.

** Another Asimov story has the Last Trump played, and everyone who has died is resurrected. Buildings, clothing, everything but people starts to disintegrate, the landscape is leveling itself out and the stars go out. A character says this is to create Hell: "Visions of hellfire and damnation were very childish. A featureless eternity will be hell for a species that can't occupy itself for a wet weekend." This is pretty much the description of the Jewish version of hell, Gehenna - Asimov himself, of course, was Jewish.

** Subverted in his short story ''Escape!'', in which seems to play it straight initially but it turns out {{spoiler|that [[Hyperspace]] travelers experience "non-existence" for the duration of the trip.}} Why do they experience anything, you ask? {{spoiler|The ship computer was fucking with their heads as a joke.}} Hey, it has the personality of an eight-year-old. Give it a break.

* In ''[[His Dark Materials]]'', The afterlife is a flat, featureless plane where the only thing that breaks up the monotony is random harpy attacks. Will and Lyra arrange for everyone in there to get oblivion instead, which is a far better (in the protagonists' opinions) fate, as it allows the atoms making up a person's ghost to distribute themselves back into the physical world. Oblivion of consciousness, yes, but a roundabout return to life.

** Those who fall into the Abyss in the world of the dead experience almost exactly this. Their souls continue to fall into the nothingness for eternity.

* The Elven afterlife, the "Halls of Mandos", is described in much these terms in ''[[The Silmarillion]]'', though it's usually temporary, more of a holding cell before elves are reincarnated. Except for the really weary elf and the really sinful elf. For Dwarves, though, this is indeed their fate. They remain in the halls, waiting till Doomsday. Humans go to the Timeless Halls of Iluvatar(God) until doomsday, when all the afterlifes will merge into the New Arda.

* The Turkey Farm in [[Kurt Vonnegut]]'s ''Slapstick''. Vonnegut also referred to something similar to this in ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five]]'', where the point in time where Billy Pilgrim experiences death is presented as nothing but violet light and a hum.

* [[Peter F. Hamilton]]'s ''[[The Nights Dawn Trilogy]]'': Science fiction author Peter F. Hamilton wrote his trilogy around this concept. The souls of the dead are trapped in The Beyond where they can see our world but not touch it; the series tells of what happens when they find a means of crossing back into the real world by possessing the bodies of the living. People soon begin to wonder why all those who return from the dead seem to be evil, or at least morally bankrupt and it's revealed toward the end of the third book that {{spoiler|only people who are unwilling to let go of their mortal lives, or believe they are not worthy of an afterlife, are stuck in this non-existance: those who accept the end of their life move on somewhere else.}}

** And actually, many Norse communities believed that only the cowardly, evil, and otherwise damned went to Helheim. Honorable craftsmen, women and children, etc, who were never expected to fight but honored Norse values were in fact sent to halls run by Frey/Freya and other less warlike gods of the pantheon. Not quite as nice as Valhalla (at least [[Blood Knight|if you're into that sort of thing]]), but pleasant enough ways to pass the time nonetheless. In at least one interpretation, these souls were the ones who would repopulate the world along with Baldur after Ragnarok. The version where everyone except warriors who die in battle go to Hel was probably perpetuated by the same historians of antiquity that wrote with authority about their [[Discredited Trope|horned helmets]].

*** Almost, the [[Complete Monster|irredeemably evil people]] go to the root of Yggdrassil in Niflheim where the dragon Niddhoggr chews their bodies for all eternity. But you have to be a right bastard for that to happen, everyone else in Niflheim (including milder evil people) have a better time of it, and except for her role in Ragnarok Hel is a pretty nice person/being/whatever. Considering the Norse pantheons (yes, plural) were so thorough as to have godesses of specific types of death, I'd consider Ran (drowning) and Ægir's (sea) halls to be more this trope.

** The Sumerians, from whom the epic is thought to originate, would bury their dead with toys, board games, and musical instruments to help pass the time.

* Sheol is the earliest Jewish concept of an afterlife, if it can be called an afterlife at all. It is mostly a kind of "nothingness" after death. In English it has been translated variously as "Hell", "the grave", and "the pit". Depending on what life was like it can be a relief from pain but is generally bleak and in itself it is not a place of punishment or reward. It is simply the existence/place to which the all dead go (Job 3:11-19). It somewhat resembles the afterlife of some of the Jews' semitic brethren like the Babylonians. It is "A land of darkness, as darkness itself; and of the shadow of death, without and order, and where the light is as darkness" (Job 10:21). It is a "land of forgetfulness" (Ps. 88:3-12) from which no one ever returns (Job 7:9) and is cut off from God and the world of the living. Sometimes it is said that God's power can reach into Sheol (Ps. 139:8) or that the spirits of the dead can be summoned to the world of the living (1 Sam. 28) but mostly it is indicated that the dead are simply gone forever. They whisper from the dust (Isa. 29:4) and exist as disincarnate "shadows" of their true living selves, an existence that is hardly existing at all. Ideas about this later evolved among some currents within Judaism and in Christianity, which also accepts Jewish scriptures as canon.

== Tabletop Games ==

* The ''[[Dungeons and Dragons]]'' setting ''[[Eberron]]'' has an afterlife plane, Dolurrh, like this; the souls within even fade away eventually. Most religions have to do with avoiding it (the Silver Flame claims that its god created a paradaisical afterlife) or having faith that something comes after it. The sourcebook notes it's not just or unjust, good or evil: it just is.

* This is the entirety of Hell in the [[Old World of Darkness]] game ''[[Demon: The Fallen]]''. The ultimate punishment to the fallen angels was to be left in a sensationless, featureless void for all eternity. [[Self-Inflicted Hell|They made it even worse soon enough.]] While not ''quite'' the Nothing "After Death", since it isn't the afterlife (the fallen didn't die and humans don't go there), it's on the same idea.

* In the [[New World of Darkness]], this is what all dead face. While the Underworld isn't exactly featureless, it's so empty and devoid of anything meaningful that it hardly makes a difference. Some who know about this find it kinder merely to destroy the dead and send them into [[Cessation of Existence|oblivion]] than to help them pass on... to a world far worse than the one they were clinging to.

** In truth, souls are supposed to return to the [[Heaven|Supernal World]] upon death, thereafter to be reincarnated with no memories. The souls of [[Mage: The Awakening|Mages]] do this automatically, but others have a more difficult time of it. The Underworld was not part of the original cosmic order, but came into existence when [[Cosmic Horror Story|the Abyss]] did; as the Abyss lay between the normal world and the Supernal Realms, it made contact with the Supernal difficult and usually one-way (souls come from the Supernal World.)

* One of the Ebon Dragon's powers in ''[[Exalted]]'' can do this to anyone he kills.