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Abstract
This paper explores manifestations of the memories of the dead in science fiction (sf) and fantasy'both ghosts and technological remains in Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea, John Crowley's "Snow," and Yang Wanqing's "Hummingbird, Resting on Honeysuckles"'in order understand how the interactions of the living and the dead helps construct a general understanding of what it means to be human. By selecting texts from both sf and fantasy, this paper will augment recent scholarship by Daniel Baker, Simon Spiegel, and Andrew Milner that refutes the long-held and popular determination made by Darko Suvin of the inferiority of fantasy to sf and their absolute separation. To analyze these texts from contrasting genres, this paper will use Taoist and Existentialist philosophies, although disparate in origin and ideas, through close reading in order to elucidate what these texts can tell about the interactions between humans and their ghosts. Taoism is a natural fit for this work for its demonstrated influence on Le Guin's work, and Existentialism appears as something of a theoretical opposite of Taoism. In considering a universal such as death through seemingly opposing genres and theories, this paper aims to be an illustration of the effectiveness of complementary contradictions such as those found with Taoist thought as tools for understanding the messiness of being a human.