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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