What necromancers in space can teach us about the science of death

For thousands of years, people have attempted to communicate with and even raise the dead using black magic known as necromancy. While a scientist might waive off such practices as pure fiction, in one popular work of fiction, necromancy is surprisingly scientific. Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb Trilogy—whose second installment, Harrow the Ninth, dropped in August—is set in a distant future in which armies of necromancers are fighting a cosmic war against the angry ghosts of undead planets. Their weapons include giant skeleton monsters, powerful spirit magic, and even darker forms of sorcery developed through diabolical laboratory experiments.

These books are heartbreaking, hilarious, and stupendously fun. For me, they also raise a question about our slightly less haunted world: Do science and necromancy actually have anything in common? After consulting with several medieval historians of death and the occult, I’ve concluded the answer is yes. Necromancy is not science, but the two have had some uncanny run-ins throughout history.

Caution: Spoilers (well, one spoiler) for the Locked Tomb Trilogy lie ahead.

In the world of the Locked Tomb, necromancy is kind of a big deal. Humanity’s descendants — the survivors of a terrible cataclysm that took place ten thousand years ago — are scattered across nine planets, or Houses, each of which is ruled by a family of powerful necromancers specializing in a different form of death magic. The Third House scions are flesh magicians who conjure oozing monsters from human meat and bodily fluids; the Fifth are spirit talkers capable of recalling the ghosts of long-dead heroes. The Ninth’s decrepit lineage is ruled by bone adepts who can raise hulking skeletons from a pinch of osseous matter. Ruling them all is the Necrolord Prime, a man who became God after resurrecting humanity from its near extinction event and using his power to reignite Dominicus, the undead star the Nine Houses orbit.

It sounds like high fantasy on a galactic stage, but in Muir’s universe, there’s more to necromancy than magic. In fact, its practitioners have advanced their craft using an approach that looks very much like the scientific method.