The resurrection of the dead through technological simulation is no longer speculative fiction but an emerging cultural practice.

Across AI, holography, digital avatars and synthetic bodies, the deceased now return as simulated revenants - entities that unsettle distinctions between presence and absence, originality and reproduction, life and afterlife.

This book conceptualises simulated revenants as hyperreal performers whose ghostly authority challenges the boundaries between fiction and reality. In doing so, it interrogates notions of agency, ethics and grief in today's world, confronting urgent ethical and ontological questions, such as:

What does it mean to perform the dead?

How is agency distributed between human operators and machinic afterlives?

How are contemporary technologies reshaping our relationship to loss, memory and mortality in the posthuman present?

Structured around three modes of simulation - embodiment, projection and psycho-mimicry - the book includes interviews with actors, coders and even a funeral director. It closely analyses works such as Ross Willis's The Leftovers (2014), Caryl Churchill's A Number (2002), Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster's Opera (2016) and holograms that have reanimated the likes of Maria Callas and ABBA.

Together, these examples reveal how corporeal replicas, spectral projections and conversational ghosts produce forms of presence that are at once artificial and culturally persuasive.