Unperson / Literature

Unpersons in literature.

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• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court ends with the Catholic Church scrubbing all knowledge of the Time Traveler Hank and the novel ideas he introduced, sealing the Stable Time Loop. All that remains is a vague idea that King Arthur's reign was a time of prosperity.
• Happens in the Alex Rider novel, Crocodile Tears. A journalist investigating the titular spy has his bank account closed and all his financial records erased, his car quietly removed (and its record deleted so it can't be traced), the locks on his flat changed, all his forms of personal ID stolen, and finally he is reported dead and framed as an escaped mental patient responsible for his own murder. MI6 restore his identity and release him on condition that he leaves Alex alone.
• In An Archdemon's Dilemma: How to Love Your Elf Bride, when Zagan suggests the possibility he might steal from the Archdemons, he's warned the revenge of an Archdemon is a slow, thorough process where everything and everyone associate with the target is eliminated until no trace of their existence remains.
• Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe: One of the main conflicts of the story is how Ari's brother has been completely erased from the family's memories after he was arrested, with his parents and sisters refusing to talk about him. He learns that it is not the shame, but rather the hurt that caused it, with his mom having a breakdown when Bernardo was arrested and couldn't bear to see him. Once that comes to the surface, they manage to talk about him, and slowly re-incorporate his memory into their lives.
• "Negation of Being" in The Assassins of Tamurin, the third most severe punishment for a crime, after mutilation and execution.
• Aurora Cycle: The first sign Fish out of Temporal Water Auri O'Malley finds that something is wrong is that the existence of the Octavia III colony, where the ship she was on was headed, has been erased from the historical record, with all data she can find claiming that the Hadfield was headed to an entirely different planet, and that Octavia III was never settled by humanity after initial surveys led to the planet being deemed dangerous and unsuited for habitation. When she tries to look up her father, who had gone to Octavia, she finds no record of him, either.
• The Avenger: The mystery that begins Benson's crimefighting career is an incident in which his own wife and daughter disappear from a plane in midflight and everyone on board, everyone at the airport they took off from, and the driver of the taxi that brought them to the airport, insists he was traveling alone.
• The Beginning After the End: It is all but stated that this fate befell Mordain Asclepius, who was once a close friend to Kezess Indrath. Their friendship came to an end when Mordain spoke out against Kezess for committing genocide upon the Djinn. After he threatened to reveal the truth, he mysteriously disappeared from Epheotus - an action that Kezess covered up more than the genocide he committed - and Mordain was henceforth referred to as the Lost Prince with no one knowing where he went. It is later revealed that he is the reason Rinia has lived her life as a hermit, as she is a disciple of his which on top of her divination powers put a massive target on her back and as such she has lived out her life in hiding.
• Commodore Perez in Bolo attempts to do this to herself due to her status as The Atoner. Following the Final War she spends nearly half a century gathering up as many humans and supplies as she can in order to establish a colony on one of the few remaining habitable worlds. Once the colony is established she kills herself leaving behind a note instructing the colony to erect no monument to her name in hopes that she will be forgotten. Her attempt is only partially successful since while the colonists respect her request they still erect a monument to her, simply leaving it blank and passing her name down through stories instead.
• Catch-22: Doc Daneeka gets declared killed in action when a plane he was listed to have been on crashes. He can't convince anyone that he isn't dead, and eventually comes to believe it himself.
• In a few Choose Your Own Adventure books, this was the worst, and most disturbing, fate.
• Circleverse:
  • In Circle of Magic, Daja is made an unperson by the Traders because of their beliefs regarding disaster survivors. At the end of the third book, Daja reroutes a giant forest fire to save another Trader clan, and in gratitude they revoke her unperson status and adopt her.
  • The Circle Opens: Shatterglass has the prathmuni of Tharios, who handle the dead. Although now that they've all gone into hiding, their status may change in the near future.
• Discworld: In Thief of Time, all evidence that Lobsang Ludd was ever at the Thieves' Guild is removed from history when he joins the History Monks.
• Dragonlance: Has shadow wights, spirits of Chaos which mimic a negative of you and upon touching you erase you from existence. Since they act as agents of terror for Chaos himself, they work as a Mind Screw - you know there was someone right there, but now you can't remember anything about them.
  • A disturbing example is a man whose wife is erased, but he still has children from her - obviously he knew her, loved her, married her, and had children with her, but he cannot remember something as simple as her name.
  • This is also used to explain how we never learn the name of the 'powerful wizard' who brought forth Takhisis the first time. When the war was lost he summoned a Shadow Wight to erase him, because he'd rather not exist than be tortured for eternity for his failure.
• The Dresden Files: Supernatural beings can only exist in the world if they are remembered by the mortals within it. Even if they are only remembered as stories or fictional characters, that connection gives them a foothold (The success of the Disney corporation is one reason that the Fairies continue to have such a large presence while other supernatural beings are fading from the world). Many ancient beings have lost all connection since their very existence has been forgotten, and others are on the very verge of non-existence. The Oblivion War is a secret struggle being waged by those few who still know about such forgotten beings, preventing knowledge of them being reintroduced to the world.
• Earth's Children: In The Clan of the Cave Bear, Ayla becomes an un-person in the eyes of the Clan when she is "cursed with death" - twice. The first death curse (imposed by Brun after Ayla is caught breaking the Clan's prohibition on females hunting) is of temporary duration and Ayla is allowed to rejoin the Clan when the time expires; she is even granted special hunting privileges. The second (imposed by Broud, who has hated Ayla almost from the start) is permanent. In both cases, the rest of the Clan cease to acknowledge Ayla's existence, though this takes a while to happen in the second instance since Broud orders her cursed without preparing them for it - and she hasn't done anything to merit being cursed in the first place.
• Jason Taverner in Philip K. Dick's Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said is a genetically engineered singer and TV star who goes from global celebrity to Un-person overnight.
• From the Forgotten Realms books:
  • In The Finder's Stone Trilogy, the Nameless Bard was once a famous Harper and musician who sought to preserve his songs for all eternally by creating an Artificial Human to act as, essentially, a living music library. The other Harpers did not approve of this reckless act of creating life, so they magically stripped him of his name, banished him to another dimension, and erased nearly all records of his existence. The plot of the trilogy happens because they weren't thorough enough: the villains of the first book discovered his research and sought him out to have him create an artificial human for them.
  • In The Dark Elf Trilogy, any Drow house destroyed by its rivals is considered to have never existed, only mentioned in very private conversations. Of course, if the would-be-destroyers fail, it's them who suffer the same fate - after a public annihilation of the entire house by the city's combined forces.
• Fuku! by E. Evtuschenko is a poem about this trope. Namely, the author discusses the name taboo (the titular "Fuku") and reminiscences about people who should be Unpersoned. His list includes Adolf Hitler, Pinochet and Columbus.
• The Giver:
  • The story's dystopian society has removed Rosemary, the previous Receiver of Memory and the Giver's daughter from the public memory, going as far as to forbid her name to be used for a new child ever again, after the memories she received dissipated out into the community when she applied for release (assisted suicide, and she knew what it was) and the members of the community had to feel emotion and pain for the first time.
  • There's a variant that is almost kinder: A young child dies, his parents are given a new child, same gender, and the same name, in order to "replace" the child that died. Because everyone's emotions are so dulled, this is an effective emotional replacement, rendering the original child meaningless.
• As noted in the Film section, Hermione does this to herself in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, forcing her parents to forget that she exists. Unlike in the film, where this is shown happening, it only gets mentioned several weeks after the event has taken place, when Harry asks Hermione if her parents will be okay. She explains that she not only wiped her own existence from their minds, but also gave them false identities and an overwhelming desire to move to Australia, which is where they remain for the entirety of the book. (Word of God has promised us that after Voldemort is defeated, Hermione gets her parents back.)
• In Gorky Park and its sequels, protagonist Arkady Renko recalls this happening during his childhood at the tail-end of the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, where at regular intervals different pictures would be cropped or burned. In Polar Star, Renko mentions that an encyclopedia set he had at home had a new article about the Bering Strait sent to him, in order to replace the article about Beria. He says it was the only time he saw his father smile, as he cut off Beria's head with scissors.
• This was considered to be the ultimate punishment in Heralds of Valdemar's Eastern Empire. It was enacted on Grand Duke Tremain, for his forging of the Imperial Seal and using fake documents marked with that seal to loot a military supply depot (which he had needed to do in order to get critical supplies his troops needed to survive after being cut off from the Empire by the Mage Storms). Since Tremain had no intention of ever going back home after looting that depot, and ended up getting made king of the nation he was supposed to conquer for the Empire, it sort of fell flat as a punishment. In fact, due to his being out of contact from the Empire, he never even found out about it.
  • Shunning (see the Real Life: Religion folder) was practiced by both Karsites and Holderkin. After Karal is falsely accused of being an Imperial spy, he goes back to his room to find the servants have already begun to shun him.
• In His Dark Materials Iofur Raknison vows to do this to Iorek Byrnison by making speaking his name a capital offense and writing him, and his idea of what a Panserbjorne should be, out of history... Just as soon as he defeats Iorek in their ritual one-on-one combat that Iorek cannot possibly win...
• Holes: The Warden wipes Zero's records after he runs away and announces that "he was never here." This comes back to bite her later.
• A Hunger in the Soul by Mike Resnick. A famous Jerkass reporter is leading an expedition on an alien planet. When a member of the expedition pisses him off, the reporter states that he won't be mentioned in the documentary he's making, so he will be lost to history. This seems an unimpressive threat, but when the man is killed the reporter gives a moving speech to his camera crew... and mumbles the name of the deceased so it's indistinguishable.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • The Illustrated Star Wars Universe: The Hoth chapter ends with a report on the nearby asteroid field by an official on a corporation owned by Durga the Hutt, and an apology for screwing up an extremely profitable mining venture. Whatever Durga did to the author for their failure was presumably fatal, but the full details remain unknown as all traces of their identity have been purged from existence; all that's left is the report and the failed attempt at an apology.
  • Darth Andeddu was one of the earliest and most monstrous members of the Sith Order, with his Villainous Legacy inspiring multiple successors. In Darth Bane, the Jedi were Genre Savvy enough to try to expunge him from the galactic record but thanks to Bane's Friend in the Black Market Argel Tenn, Andeddu's legacy survived long enough to inspire even more Darths like Tyranus and Krayt.
• This is the harshest form of punishment the dwarves of The Inheritance Cycle can bestow. Also, the dragons wiped every single memory of the forsworn's dragons' names - including the memories of said dragons. The names cannot be read, remembered, nor spoken.
• Journey to Chaos: There was a person in the Bladi Clan who did something so horrible that the rest of the clan excommunicated him. After that they did their best to forget about him and people outside the clan will skirt the issue when the incident comes up. When Basilard Bladi comes face to the face with this person, he insists on addressing him as "The Exile".
• This sets off the plot of Landslide by Desmond Bagley. A man with no memory of his past after a car accident finds the town square is named after Trinavant, the man whose family was killed in the same accident. He then finds that the name Trinavant has been removed from all public areas, despite him being a town founder. Turns out a powerful businessman, worried that the protagonist might regain his memory if prompted, has erased any mention of the name (unfortunately the square had been named by a federal government official whom he couldn't coerce). This starts the protagonist investigating exactly what happened on that day.
• A threat by King Haggard in The Last Unicorn, made all the scarier by the vagueness of just how Haggard would accomplish it.
  "You are losing my interest," the rustling voice interrupted him again, "and that is very dangerous. In a moment I will have forgotten you quite entirely, and will never be able to remember just what I did with you. What I forget not only ceases to exist, but never really existed in the first place."
• A major plot point in the Legend of Jig Dragonslayer trilogy was the Forgotten Gods: Gods who had rebelled against the divine hierarchy and were sentenced to be utterly forgotten by all civilized beings as punishment. And this forgetting couldn't be undone - at least one of them found that whenever they introduced themselves to anyone, the people they said their name to would forget it within seconds. Then they discovered a loophole: the curse only applied to civilized being. Uncivilized races, such as goblins, weren't affected.
• Discussed and then defied in Mick Harte Was Here, when Mick hangs pictures of Wocket, his dog, on his bedroom mirror to make sure he won't forget her after her death.
  "What if I forget her, Phoeb? If I forget her, it'll be like she was never even here."
• The hero and narrator of My Name is Legion did this to himself. As one of the few people with a trapdoor into the global identification database, he could at will input specifics for a new identity and then erase it when he no longer needed it. The people in his 'Verse were awfully trusting about information they got from their computers...
• In Nineteen Eighty-Four, which also used (and popularized) the trope name. As O'Brien says to Winston Smith:
  "You must stop imagining that posterity will vindicate you, Winston. Posterity will never hear of you. You will be lifted clean out from the stream of history. We shall turn you into gas and pour you into the stratosphere. Nothing will remain of you, not a name in a register, not a memory in a living brain. You will be annihilated in the past as well as in the future. You will never have existed."
• In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, Richard Mayhew's act of kindness towards Door in the first act of the story results in him becoming an Unperson to London Above, or his normal life. He cannot access financial records, no one at his work recognizes him and the flat he was living in has been rented out from underneath him. Only by finding Door again and joining her on her quest can he return to his old reality.
  Richard: On Friday I had a job, a fiancee, and a life that made sense. (Well, as much as any life makes sense.) Then I found an injured girl bleeding on the pavement, and I tried to be a Good Samaritan. Now I've got no fiancee, no home, no job, and I'm walking around a couple of hundred feet under the streets of London with the projected life expectancy of a suicidal fruitfly.
• Chikage Koori from Nogi Wakaba is a Hero received this treatment because she went on a rampage and tried to kill another character. Taisha refused her burial services and all records of her existence were erased, though one of her friends made sure that proof of her existence still exists somewhere.
• In Pact, the abstract demon Ur does this to those that it devours, erasing them from the memories of the world and damaging those that they leave behind. It's speculated that the reason that it's trapped in an abandoned factory but nobody can remember how it got there is that someone very powerful trapped it, and then went in to try to kill it permanently, but lost, leaving it to steadily eat away at the bindings. Halfway through the story, it does this to the protagonist after killing him, and an extended interlude displays how his friends forgot him and would always wonder who they lost, his Familiar was rendered broken and dying, unable to sustain itself because it couldn't remember how to exist, and the truce he'd brokered among the practitioners of Toronto was rendered nonexistent because he'd done so personally, and none of them remembered making the agreement with him.
• The Phryne Fisher short story "Hotel Splendide", based on the legend of "The Vanishing Hotel Room". This time, though, a) the husband is still alive, and b) he didn't have the plague, as the paranoid hotel manager feared—he had malaria.
• In The Priory of the Orange Tree, Inysh depictions of Cleolind are based on the artist's speculation because Galian Berethnet had all statues and portraits of her destroyed in grief when she died in childbirth. That is the common assumption. He actually ordered it because "Cleolind" was his adopted mother, who hypnotized him into thinking she was Cleolind so that he'd marry her, and the spell broke when she nearly died in childbirth. Then, his loyal knights hushed up the fact that he subsequently hanged himself.
• Rai Kirah: Ezzarians shun those whom they consider irredeemably impure, such as former slaves; they speak of them as though they had died and pretend to be unaware of the shunned one's presence. By their code, the shunned person is dead in every way that matters, never mind the fact that their body's still walking and talking.
• Cleverly handled by Brian Stableford in Rhapsody In Black. The subterranean theocracy of God's Nine Splinters has no place to actually banish offenders... so they are simply declared nonexistent. Both loyal and criminals live in the same dismal environment, but nobody will acknowledge that the criminals are there. This is circumvented on occasion when guards decide to do target practice by shooting at the space which "just happened to be occupied by us nonexistent people", and when Grainger tells a captive he can pass the time by talking to his "imaginary" guard.
• The Riftwar Cycle: In Prince of the Blood, this is part of the punishment that Lord Fire receives (In addition to humiliation, mutilation, being fed to a crocodile, and having his sentence recited to him every fifteen minutes for the last day of his life so he can't get any sleep) for attempted treason. His name was stricken from every document mentioning his existence, replaced with 'One Who Betrayed His Country', and it became illegal for any member of the Keshian nobility to give a child his first name ever again. Whenever anyone in Kesh refers to him later in the series, it is never by name, only by indirect reference, such as 'One Whose Name Has Been Forgotten'.
• Safehold:
  • In book 8, Hell's Foundations Quiver, it's revealed that folk hero Seijin Kohdy was in fact a real person, and that Cody Cortazar was subjected to the unperson treatment by the "Archangels" after, having had the memories of the combat skills he possessed as a Sergeant Major of the Terran Federation Marines reactivated to become a seijin, began to remember things he wasn't supposed to. When he went to talk to the "Archangels" about it, he was murdered, and after the end of the war, his tomb was destroyed by one last secret Rakurai strike and The Testimonies were edited to remove any mention of him. Only the Sisters of Saint Kohdy remembered that he was anything more than a legend.
  • Siddarmark uses a variation on this trope after Sword of Schueler-inspired mutinies in the Siddarmark Army. All units that mutinied are wiped permanently off the Army List, as are their battle honors. However, any soldiers in those units still face trial and possible execution for treason and mutiny should they fall into the army's hands, and since most of the mutineers joined the church's Army of God that's not an empty threat.
• Alvin Schwartz's Scary Stories series includes a version of the legend of "The Vanishing Hotel Room" titled "Maybe You Will Remember".
• In Seven Sorcerers by Caro King, Bogeymen have this as a power. They force people who knew a child to forget him/her, and any document/photo with them is altered. Then they make all things belonging to the child disappear. And then they kidnap the child, and nobody is going to miss him/her!
• In The Shadow of Kyoshi, this is done to both Jianzhu and Yun by the Earth Kingdom. The former misidentified the latter as the Avatar and paraded him around every major political figure in the world for years. What it was revealed Yun wasn't the Avatar and Kyoshi was, the entire situation became a scandal that reflected badly on all of Jianzhu's allies and a national embarrassment for the Earth Kingdom. Thus, influential Earth Sages (many of those former allies of Jianzhu) are doing everything they can to forget the two ever existed and sweep the mess under the rug. This is a major source of frustration for Kyoshi, because that extends to refusing to help her find Yun, fearing his reappearance could return the scandal to the public conscious.
• Stu Redman realizes the army was going to do this after things fell apart in The Stand. They would have burned his body and his records.
  "Stu Redman was going to become an un-person."
• Star Trek Expanded Universe:
  • Peter David:
    • In one of the early TNG novels, Strike Zone, the worst punishment in Klingon society is to be stripped of one's name. This actually matches pretty well with how the Klingons were eventually portrayed on the show — after Worf accepts "discommendation", he's essentially an Unperson (this happens to him twice).
    • Star Trek: New Frontier: When the New Thallonian Protectorate is attacked, Si Cwan finds that one Thallonian was away from his post at the time (actually, he was killed by the doppelganger impersonating Si Cwan's sister), and decides to Unperson him as punishment.
  • In Rihannsu, the Romulans have their own version of discommendation in the form of having one's name be ritually written and burned three times before the Senate. After this, no one is allowed to speak the individual's name ever again. Even Ael's fellow rebels against the Empire hold to this in the last book.
• Stray: Pufftail tells of grandson of when he was forced into a cat colony called "the Commune". Years before Pufftail joined the Commune, a few cats dubbed "the Rebels" tried to overthrow the tyrannical leader Tom-Cat. The Rebels mysteriously disappeared and it became a crime to say their names. Soon they became a distant memory because few cats were old enough to remember them.
• Mentioned briefly in Suburban Senshi Rise Of The Magical Girl. Red Mage is the name of a woman who apparently had a relationship with Doctor Xadium, before she and her entire universe were apparently wiped from the timeline. None of the other characters remember her. It’s heavily hinted at that this was Vermillia’s grandmother.
• In Tale of the Troika by the Strugatsky Brothers, the titular Troika possesses the Big Round Seal, which is capable of fulfilling any bureaucratic order. So if one uses it on an order "delete all records about XXX", then all records about XXX disappear, and will disappear again if somebody makes them. In story this is used only on a lake, but the possibility to use it on a person exists.
• In Guy Gavriel Kay's Tigana, the residents of the titular country put up so much resistance to invading sorcerer-king Brandin of Ygrath (especially in killing his favorite son), that when he wins he casts a spell that erases Tigana almost completely. It disappears from all written record and living memory — except the memories of the few surviving Tiganans themselves. Only they can hear it spoken, or read it written, and thus forced to live with the knowledge that when they've died, it will be as if they and their home never existed.
• Warhammer 40,000: In the Gaunt's Ghosts novel "First and Only", the Jantine Patricians regiment is scrubbed from imperial archives after they're wiped out in an unsuccessful attack on another imperial regiment.
• In the Warrior Cats book Outcast, when Stormfur and Brook were exiled, Stoneteller had declared that they were now dead to the Tribe, and when they return, he and others insist that they can't return because they're dead. Stormfur points out that just because Stoneteller says they're dead doesn't mean that they actually are.
• The Wheel of Time
  • The Seachan strike the names of all damane from the records upon discovery.
  • Balefire can do this. It not only kills you in the present, but it burns you out of existence into the past, undoing things you might have done. Strong enough balefire can make it as if a person was never born, with only the balefire user remembering the shadow of their existence. In theory. In practice, the strongest Balefire ever used (by the strongest human magic user period, with a unusually, but not godly, powerful magic booster) only erased an hour, two at most. It seems unlikely that even the largest possible circle using the most powerful sa'angreal ever crafted could erase any meaningfully aged character from existence.
• In Wolf Hall, Henry VIII treats Katherine of Aragon this way—he leaves without saying goodbye and never speaks to her again. He houses her more or less comfortably in Kimbolton, but refuses to visit her or even read her letters (including her deathbed letter, in which she professes still to love him) and does his best to ignore that she ever existed. When he decides to get rid of Anne Boleyn he starts the same way, by leaving without saying goodbye.^note After her execution, Henry would have all portraits of her destroyed, which is why we only have one that we know is her. Annulling both marriages is a lower-key version because it essentially says "that didn't count" and made the daughters of both marriages, Mary Tudor and Elizabeth Tudor, legal bastards.
• In Stephen Baxter's Xeelee Sequence novels, the alien Qax attempt to do this to the history of humankind, in a project known as the extirpation, in order to make them better slaves.
• In the Exordium series by Smith and Trowbridge, one historical Panarch (ruler of the dominant society) is known only as "the Faceless One"—this Panarch used planet-wrecking weapons on a planet that had lowered its defenses and as a result has been struck from the historical record. The only record of their name or likeness anywhere is in a worm-program that crawls the data nets looking for other occurrences of that name or likeness so that it can delete them. Artwork of this Archon still exists, but the face on every piece of art has been obliterated.

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