Science Fiction and Fantasy  weren’t respected literary genres when I was little.  That’s hard to believe in the age of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games but the fiction welcomed on the best-seller lists and the book award nominations tended to fall in the “could-be-true-but-isn’t” category.  These were heavy tomes with heavy ideas by heavy hitters in the writing game: Faulkner, Katherine Anne Porter, Bill Styron.  (In those days, it was good to be a Southern Writer).  Liking SF and Fantasy were almost considered the hallmark of an immature intellect.  By the mid 1970’s the stigma was starting to lift but it was still heavy enough to obscure a brilliant novel.  If you are looking for an intelligent, fascinating, often humorous trip through hell, I suggest you find a copy of Inferno by Niven and Pournelle.

Inferno is dedicated to Dante Alighieri and is an homage to the first part of his Divine Comedy but the authors updated the structure.  Instead of Dante himself, the hero of Inferno is Alan Carpentier, a minor SF writer who managed to fall from an eight story window while showing off at a Science Fiction convention.  He returns to consciousness trapped in a bottle, lying beyond the Vestibule of Hell.  Once he screams out the only open-sesame that will work in this paradigm (Why does it take so long for some characters to say, “Help me, God!”?   Don’t they notice that’s the only way some movie characters survive?) he meets a guide named Benny who says the only way out is to walk down through the center of Hell.   Carpentier has to go to the bottom to get to the top.

Carpentier and his guide traverse the levels of Underworld laid out by Dante.  However, there are some modern updates to exact punishments on contemporary professions. (When Minos, Judge of the Underworld gets an argument from Carpentier’s guide, he replies, “Lawyers.  I have problems with lawyers.  There are so many places appropriate to the breed.”)  For example, Real estate developers and tree huggers wage never-ending war against each other and the punishment for advertising men is so bad, the cast of Mad Men will start wearing sackcloth and ashes to avoid being mistaken for their characters in the next life.   (Trust me, you don’t want to know!)

In each case, the condemned face a punishment that is appropriate to their actions but ludicrously out of proportion.  My favorite is Himuralibima, the first bureaucrat (a candidate for suffering, surely!)  who will be allowed to retire once he submits the proper application forms in his accustomed format, cuneiform.   That means he’s writing out his application on mud tablets which dry out in Perdition’s heat long before he can finish them.   Some four thousand years after his death, he’s carved out a bay-sized (as in San Francisco Bay) amount of mud from one side of the Wall of Dis and his discarded, baked-too-soon efforts have become a ford over another river but his application’s not done yet. Another soul, who bought irreplaceable books but refused to spend the necessary bucks to take care of his library, is caught in the DMZ between the Hoarders and Wasters as they roll Cadillac-sized diamonds at each other in another eternal battle for moral superiority.

Without letting go of the humor, Inferno asks the reasonable question, “What is the purpose of Hell?”  Because the suffering is eternal, the punishment of the condemned always ends up being far worse than the crimes they committed to enter this place.  The authors, Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, get the credit for coming up with a reasonable answer.   But I’m not going to tell you what it is.  Read the book and find out for yourself.  It’s the only way someone should  voluntarily go to hell.