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Article: How to Live Forever: Science Fiction and Philosophy.
- Article from:
- Utopian Studies
- Article date:
- January 1, 1997
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1997 Society for Utopian Studies. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Stephen R.L. Clark. London: Routledge, 1995. vii + 223 pp. $69-95.
In How to Live Forever Stephen Clark provides examples of stories concerning immortality drawn from the genre of science fiction--"our century's greatest gift to literature" (5), immortality as not only its abiding, but "almost the only theme" (5). These stories are offered as literary thought experiments, as "ways of making vivid to ourselves what we can say more laboriously" (98) about the nature of human selves; their diachronic conditions of identity; and in what, if anything, a desirable immortality might consist.
Having said this, on the issue of what it is that (logically) must ...