Who Goes There?

Niven and Pournelle had similar temperaments and politics, but their career trajectories were a fair bit different. Larry Niven emerged as arguably the best new hard SF writer of the ’60s, after being discovered by Frederik Pohl, winning a Hugo for his story “Neutron Star” and appearing in Dangerous Visions. Despite being just the kind of writer John W. Campbell would want, at least on paper, Niven stuck to Pohl’s magazines, and even appeared several times in F&SF. Niven’s biggest contribution to SF is undoubtedly his Known Space universe, in which mankind inhabits the galaxy alongside several intelligent alien races, most famously the Kzinti, a warmongering catlike race that are technically also canonical to the Star Trek universe. Niven’s most famous novel, Ringworld, also won a Hugo (and a Nebula), and served as an influence on the Halo franchise. (The titular halos are basically like Niven’s ringworld, but smaller and serving a different function.) Jerry Pournelle took a bit longer to go pro than Niven, despite being a few years older. He had been active as a fan since at least the early ’60s, but didn’t appear professionally in the field until 1971, just in time to have his first stuff bought by Campbell’s before the latter’s passing. Pournelle has his own ambitious universe, called the CoDominium universe, involving a future history that very much takes after those by Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson. Eventually Pournelle stuck more to writing nonfiction rather than fiction, although he still collaborated with Niven sometimes, with their novels often being bestsellers.

At the time that Inferno was published, it came between two of Niven and Pournelle’s biggest successes, those being The Mote in God’s Eye (set in the CoDominium universe) and the massive standalone Lucifer’s Hammer. Despite being much shorter than these novels, Inferno is considerably more obscure, maybe because it’s harder to get a read on in terms of its genre. It’s been labeled at different times as SF and/or fantasy, being serialized in Galaxy (granted that Galaxy occasionally published fantasy) and with Jim Baen himself calling it SF, but with other sources calling it a fantasy novel. So, let’s call it science-fantasy. Obviously this is a riff on Dante’s The Divine Comedy (says someone who has not read The Divine Comedy yet), but also with a heavy metatextual element. Contemporary reviewers in the genre magazines also ignored Inferno, inexplicably, which didn’t stop it from getting Hugo and Nebula nominations.

Placing Coordinates

Inferno was serialized in Galaxy, August to October 1975. It was published in book form the following year, supposedly expanded although I can’t imagine by much. It seems to still be in print.

Enhancing Image

Allen Carpentier is dead, to begin with. Allen (I’m gonna be calling him by his first rather than last name) has died, in what has to be one of the more embarrassing ways someone can die. In life he was a bestselling (although not that respected) science fiction author, and the first scene he recounts is that at some unspecified science fiction convention. By the way, his real last name is Carpenter, but he added the i so as to appear more distinctive on book covers, although even in his internal monologue he refers to himself as Carpentier. Well, he was an author, and historically there’ve been a lot of hijinks at conventions like these, some more innocuous than others. Allen takes part in a bet, or you could say it’s a drinking game. He’s to finish a fifth of rum while sitting on an opened window sill, some eight stories above ground level. Not only does he fail the bet, falling to his death, but nobody even sees him do so, since the crowd got distracted by Isaac Asimov (I’m not kidding) entering the scene and naturally hogging all the attention. That Asimov is depicted as an egomaniac is accurate enough, although his penchant for sexual harassment (something which at this point was kind of an open secret) goes unmentioned.

For a while Allen finds himself miraculously conscious but without any of his senses. He is somehow nowhere at no particular point in time, but soon he really wakes up to find himself in the Vestibule, in Hell. Well, it’s supposed to be like Hell, although Allen is not convinced that it’s the real deal. He would be totally lost if not for the help of a fat, balding, middle-aged, and “Mediterranean” man who simply calls himself Benito. Both Allen and Benito are very much aware of Dante’s epic poem, although Allen is irreligious while Benito seems to be some flavor of zealous Christian, and as such they have very different interpretations of the situation. Benito thinks that they’re really in Hell, of course, as modeled after Dante’s version of it, whereas Allen thinks they’re in a man-made reproduction of said version, which he decides to call Infernoland. Allen takes on the position of Dante (the self-insert character, not the author) while Benito takes on the role of Virgil. This implies a couple things: that Allen is himself a self-insert for the authors, and that Benito, like Virgil, is a real historical figure. I’m gonna hold off on saying it outright, but who Benito is supposed to be has to be this novel’s most poorly kept secret. It’s apparently supposed to be a twist, but I’ve seen at least one reviewer casually give that away. It’s not hard to figure out, though, and knowing the answer makes Benito’s interactions with other characters, along with the authors’ implicit view of him, a lot more… let’s say awkward. I have some thoughts.

Similarly to Allen thinking of Infernoland as like a theme park, the novel itself feels like a darkly funny theme park ride, rather than a serious novel. Actually, from what I can tell, it seems like people who’ve read Inferno have a bad habit of taking it a little too seriously. More understandably your enjoyment of this novel will depend on a) your sense of humor, and b) how much you can tolerate Niven and Pournelle’s “I just wanna grill, for God’s sake!” conservatism. Just like how the real Dante used his epic poem to rag on people and historical figures he didn’t like, Niven and Pournelle use the setting of their novel as a pretext for taking potshots at certain types of people, and even occasionally named individuals. Granted that I’m only a third in so far, I was expecting worse. Some of the authors’ targets are what you’d expect from a couple of right-wingers (there’s a scene where they poke fun at treehuggers), but their targets aren’t always people on the so-called left (scene with said treehugger also depicts a real estate yuppie type just as unflatteringly). The people that Allen and Benito find in Infernoland are not necessarily “bad” people either, but often people who simply indulged in one of the deadly sins too much. While in the circle for gluttons they meet Jan Petri, whom Allen was friends with in life, Petri having died suddenly some years before. Petri is a decent guy, except he’s also one of those people who’s neurotic about dieting, which, as Benito (if I remember right) points out, is its own kind of gluttony. There’s also the first circle of Infernoland the two men go through, which the inhabitants see as purgatory, and indeed it’s not half bad an existence. The first circle includes people who died without having heard of The Word™, as well as unbaptized children. Allen is understandably disturbed by all this, but he’s also of the mind that really these people are robotic doubles of real people.

At this point, Inferno could be considered fantasy but as envisioned by writers who normally write science fiction. Allen writes (or wrote) SF, and being a rationalist he tries to find a non-supernatural explanation for Infernoland—even if the explanations he comes up with may as well be magical. He thinks of Infernoland as an incredibly ambitious theme park, one not made for entertainment but for the sadistic pleasure of “the Builders.” Allen doesn’t seem to believe in the God of Abraham, but rather he finds it easier to believe that Infernoland was made by a kind of demiurge, or a team of human-hating demigods. The absurdity of Allen trying to find a “natural” explanation for Infernoland when a supernatural explanation would do just as well says something about the religious stances of the authors, although it’s a bit complicated. Pournelle was a practicing Catholic while Niven is an atheist, but both men took a materialist stance on things, with Pournelle (as far as I can tell) keeping his religious beliefs walled off from his nonfiction writing. It’s worth mentioning that Pournelle, along with being friends with Niven, was also good friends with H. Beam Piper, who was also an outspoken atheist. Of course, science fiction has a long history of authors who are, if not agnostic or atheistic outright, prone to keeping their religious leanings on the sidelines when it comes to their work. Obviously there are some notable exceptions, but the idea that one need not be a Catholic or even a Christian to “get” Inferno.

There Be Spoilers Here

The back end of this installment is basically a quest, in which Allen and Benito try to build a glider from scraps that they might fly a high rim wall, by which they might be able to escape Hell. Assuming there’s anything “outside” the wall. How this will turn out, we don’t know—or at least Allen doesn’t know. We can safely guess the glider will not work, because we still have two installments to go. This is like when a movie tries tricking you into thinking it’s about to end, but you’re watching it on streaming or home video so you can look at the time stamp and know it’s LYING. At least the making of the glider, including Benito conning a not very smart desk worker (there is, of course, bureaucracy in Hell), is fun.

A Step Farther Out

I’ve seen some pretty mixed opinions on Inferno, but I’m enjoying it so far. Not sure why Niven and Pournelle felt it necessary to write a sequel thirty-odd years later, given that this feels like very much a standalone. While the setting is big, there’s also only so much you can do with it, at least with these two particular characters. You can only do the “sci-fi author doesn’t believe he’s in a fantasy world” routine for so long. For a comedy, which Inferno more or less is, you don’t wanna overdo a joke. I can see why the book version’s only about 240 pages, compared to the behemoths that came before and after it, since it’s meant to be more lightweight.

See you next time.