I
lay flat on the rock and looked up. At the end of the vertical tube, the pinpoint light source had all but vanished, leaving Benito nearly invisible. Many hours later the light brightened again, and I knew I was seeing the sun. Benito was a dark fleck that moved if I watched it long enough.
He had made good progress before the light dimmed and went out.
The water sounds burbled back from the rock walls. I lay with my arms folded behind my head, taking joy in laziness. The peace of this place was almost tangible. Worrying seemed inappropriate here: a breach of good manners.
What did they do to Billy? Did the priest get out all right? How could any thinking being do such a thing to Mrs. Herrnstein? I’ve got to get back—
But I felt no sense of urgency. The damned had all the time there was, and so did I. Hell was the violent ward of a hospital for the theologically insane. Some could be cured.
I would have to return to Hell. I was afraid of that; not afraid of the pains, or that the demons would catch me, because the pains would heal, and pain in the right cause is a badge of honor. As to the demons, there’d be no chance they could hold me. Not now. I knew.
No. My fear was the doubts that would return. They would come, and I’d just have to live with them, and fight them with my memory of these few moments of peace. There were no doubts here. None at all.
The light was back, and there was a tiny mote in it that moved even as I watched. My eyes were better than human now; else I’d never have seen him at all.
The light was dimming with sunset when the mote moved out of it and left it clear.
INFERNO NOTES
Our first work in collaboration was The Mote in God’s Eye. It was enormously successful, and has since become something of a science-fiction classic.
We are often asked to comment on successful collaborations, since most don’t work. We have talked about this so often that we have devised some working rules that cover our situation; others may have different methods. In our case we begin with mutual appreciation: if one of us thinks something is wrong, then there’s something wrong, and it’s time to fix it. Although there is always a “senior” author whose decision is final for each of our works, that has never been invoked: we have settled all our differences through discussion, often discovering in the process that we were both wrong.
Having established a successful collaborative team, we planned a second work, Oath of Fealty, a book about modern urban technology and unrest. It eventually became a bestseller, but we had hardly begun it when Larry Niven said, one night over coffee, that he had wanted to do a modern sequel to the first book of Dante’s Divine Comedy since he first read it. Niven had been fascinated by Dante’s Inferno, but had always been concerned about the theological/philosophical underpinnings of the book. The naïve Roman Catholicism of Dante Alighieri would hardly do for a twentieth-century readership.
Jerry Pournelle immediately said, “Suppose we look at Dante as C. S. Lewis might have? Lewis’s The Great Divorce looks at an entirely different geography of Hell, but it certainly provides a consistent philosophy.” We continued the discussion, and before the night was over we had the beginnings of a novel, including the main character, Allen Carpenter, a somewhat pretentious but successful science-fiction writer modeled on a composite of several people we knew. We had also determined the theme of the book: Carpenter is dead, and in the Inferno, but he does not believe in Heaven and Hell. The book is about his efforts to discover where he is, and why. Our Inferno would employ Lewis’s theology and Dante’s geography.
Despite taking high school Latin, neither of us reads Italian well enough to work from the original. We chose the Dante translation by John Ciardi, and it is from that translation that the quotations from Dante are drawn. We can recommend it.
The book was written quickly. The reader can move through quickly as a tourist, but Carpenter—and therefore the authors—was actually there, and it was not an enjoyable experience for him. We tried to keep that experience short.
Inferno was far more successful than anyone had predicted. Although it was never on the bestseller list, it went through more than twenty printings, and has never been out of print for more than a few years since it was first published in 1976. We are told that our version of Inferno inspired a new wave of interest in Dante among college students, and was responsible for the release of a new printing of the Ciardi translation. There are worse movements to inspire.
The book’s success demanded a sequel, and over the years we were urged to write one. The inevitable temptation was to call that sequel “Purgatorio” and use the geography of the second of Dante’s books of the Divine Comedy, but that was never very tempting. Inferno is certainly the most interesting of Dante’s books; besides, those in Purgatorio are already saved and know they are. Carpenter had no such surety.
Shortly after the millennium we agreed that we had not exhausted the potential of the Inferno. Allen Carpenter had not entirely discovered the nature of Hell and why he was in it. We also realized that we had not entirely dealt with the theological revisions accepted by the Vatican II Council, although it was clear that Vatican II required doctrinal changes that didn’t entirely fit Dante’s notions. Our working title for the second work was “Dante Meets Vatican II.” Those matters and more appear in Inferno II (forthcoming).
Larry Niven, Chatsworth, December 2007
Jerry Pournelle, Studio City, December 2007
Larry Niven, Inferno
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