If you must know, I was writing better than he ever did before I left high school. He wrote whole novels in baby talk, with sixth-grade drawings in them, and third-grade science, and he knew better. Why him? A science fiction writer who lied about being a science fiction writer because he got more money that way. Kurt Vonnegut may have a tomb complete with blinking neon SO IT GOES sign because he made up false religions, but it is clear that Niven and Pournelle put him in the sixth circle for different reasons. And, as in Dantes version, we occasionally hear the sound of personal axes grinding. He witnesses the punishment of corrupt environmentalists and real estate developers. Carpenter runs into Billy the Kid, Henry VIII, and Vlad the Impaler, the real life Dracula. Like its model, the Niven-Pournelle Inferno is in part a cultural travelogue in which Carpenter and the reader get to meet the famous and ponder their fates. Benito informs Carpenter that there is an exit from Hell, but, just as in Dantes telling, one first must pass through into Hells deepest level. This sets up the main question of the novel: If Dantes description of Hell was literal and precise, what is the purpose of Hell, and what does the existence of Hell say about a God described as compassionate and forgiving?Īs Dante was guided through Hell by Virgil, so Carpenter is given his own Italian guide, a somewhat mysterious man known only as Benito. Eventually, however, he is forced to conclude that his revival is due to the supernatural rather than super science. Carpenter, a modern agnostic and science-fiction writer who wrote under the name Carpentier, tries to convince himself that he has been resuscitated thousands of years in the future by advanced technology. Allen Carpenter falls out of an eighth-story window and wakes up in the Hell described by Dante Alighieri in The Divine Comedy. In 1976 they teamed up to write Inferno, a novel that might be characterized as hard fantasy. Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are two of its most successful practitioners. Hard s-f is a subgenre of science fiction that emphasizes scientific accuracy.
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