Niven and Pournelle: 'Inferno'

I just finished re-reading "Inferno" for what is probably the seventh or eighth time. Not the one by Dante Alighieri, the hauntingly beautiful first installment in "The Divine Comedy." This was the retelling, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

The book would have benefitted from another draft. Because the narrator is a sci-fi writer, much of the book is dominated by sci-fi talk, as he tries to find scientic explanations for everything he encounters on his journey through hell. And because this is a Niven book, it's chock-full of sly and not-so-subtle references to his other works. Those things get a little distracting.

But I keep reading and re-reading the book. I've read it more times than I have read Dante's classic -- which, in all fairness to me, was among the books stolen from me when I left Haiti -- and more times even than I've read T.H. White's "The Sword in the Stone." Probably the only book I've read more is "The Lord of the Rings." Maybe. ("Inferno" clocks in at 237 pages. Tolkien's masterpiece is well over a thousand.)

Part of the appeal is that it is an easy read. Give me an uninterrupted afternoon, and I'll plow through "Inferno" in a couple hours. It's harder to do that with Ursula LeGuin's "Wizard of Earthsea" series, and impossible with "The Nibelungenleid," even setting aside matters of length. They just have more going on.

Undeniably, I also get a perverse kick out of seeing whom Niven and Journelle have placed among the ranks of the damned. There's Himuralabima, who invented bureaucracy; one of Niven's own fictional characters, from "A Time out of Mind"; Niven and Pournelle themselves, amalgamated in the main character, a science fiction writer named Allen Carpentier; and historical American figures like Billy the Kid, among others.

There's also just enough information given in a few cases to identify other real people who were alive at the time of the book's publication, such as Kurt Vonnegut and L. Rob Hubbard.

Part of the pleasure clearly lies in the funereal beauty that Dante gave his hell. Yes, this comes through despite Niven and Pournelle's attempts to put it in science fiction parlance, like describing the plains of Judecca as frozen nitrogen, suggesting that Minos' extensible tail relies on hyperspatial conduits, or putting a collapsed singularity near Satan's navel.

The book suffers from those touches but it positively flourishes when Niven and Pournelle stay true to the idea of Dante's work, or even embellish it. The pit of flatterers, where sinners trod around in human excrement, becomes obscenely appropriate, as we find that the excrement comes out of their mouths whenever they speak.

Similar innovations lie in the Ninth Circle of hell, where Dante depicted traitors frozen in ice. Here Carpentier discovers politicians imprisoned for betraying their own consciences for the sake of party loyalty, Earlier in the journey through hell he encountered violent wasters.

In Dante's time, these were people who ostentatiously destroyed objects of great value in order to display their wealth and in hell were chased by mad dogs. In Niven and Pournelle's novel, this presumed antiquated sin is committed by real estate developers who are chased by bulldozers.

Much of the appeal, though, lies in Carpentier's outrage at a pervasive sense of injustice. The eternal punishments of hell, he feels, are too much, too late. What purpose does such unending torment serve? We incarcerate criminals for a few years, maybe even for many years, if their crimes were heinous and they lack the money to hire a good lawyer. But sooner or later, they complete their sentence, they qualify for parole, or they die. At some point, each of them is done and free to leave, if nowhere else, then at least to the final peace of the grave.

But hell? Nothing doing. Day and night, year after year, the torment of the damned continues. Dante depicts homosexuals tormented in a desert where fire falls from the sky like snowflakes, religious schismatics are cut in half, and violent wasters are pursued by mad dogs. In hell the violent are trapped in a river of boiling blood, and traitors are frozen in ice. Judas himself is one of three sinners condemned to be chewed upon by one of Satan's three mouths for all eternity.

That's Dante's imagery, of course, but he didn't make it up ex nihilo. The doctrine of hell predated him by hundreds of years, and while he may have embellished it, Christians have subscribed to a belief in hell since the days of Rome.

And I don't know of many Christians who don't find it at least a little problematic to think that the nice God we sing pretty songs to on Sunday could insist on torturing billions of people for all eternity. Even those who resist saying so, usually will admit to difficulty when pressed, though they'll always insist that God is just in all he does.

And God is just, being God and all. May God be true and everyone a liar -- but hell still seems harsh when you get down to it. Are the joys of heaven possible only if the damned writhe in eternal torment? Is there some sort of balance, and the Nine Worlds will come crashing down if the fire is quenched and the worm ceases to gnaw?

Does hell exist so the elect can feel safe from people who hurt them in this life? If so, it's going to make heaven a lonely place if that's the case, since everyone hurts someone.

This struggle, which is at the heart and soul of Niven and Pournelle's "Inferno," truly gets going once Carpentier pushes his guide into the Pit of the Evil Counselors. Carpentier is struck by remorse. He identifies increasingly not just with the plight of the damned but also with the sins that put them there, and he discovers an interesting doctrine of hell; namely, that it's the hotbox God uses to get our attention when all else has failed. The worse we've sinned, the greater the heat, in hopes that something will get through to us.

(If you've read "The Divine Comedy," you'll recall that Virgil led Dante on his journey through the nine circles of hell, through their very center, thus to Purgatory and onward to Heaven, where Beatrice took over. Niven and Pournelle jumped to the logical conclusion that Dante's path shows the way for all the damned to leave hell, making it in essence a zeroth level of Purgatory and creating a universalist view of the afterlife that makes fundamentalists run screaming for the door.)

In the end, "Inferno" moves from being merely an updated vision of Dante's work, to a commentary on the work and even on the doctrine of hell itself. I have no answers myself, just questions that echo in my own soul when I read this book, and that itself is a triumph of sorts, and why I keep reading this book.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'the gameplayers of zan'

It took about 400 pages, but I finally am hooked on "The Gameplayers of Zan."

This is the second of M.C. Foster's books about the ler, the artificially evolved new humans of "Warriors of the New Dawn." I've been reading it a book club I've started among friends, and it has been nothing but awful. There is some interesting world-building behind this book, but the author's attempts at building at atmosphere of suspense and mystery fall woefully short.

If you have never heard of the ler, they are a new race of humans created by attempts to push human evolution artificially. The new humans have two thumbs and one finger on each hand, and supposedly are faster, deadlier and more intelligent than traditional humans.

The book is supposed to be something of suspense. Regular humans are suspicious of the ler, and the suspicion centers around zan, a game that supposedly is a big deal in ler society. Except we're never given the impression that is. The book instead follows an investiation by one ler into the death of another, and it's a tedious investigation that involves a lot of walking, discussion and a number of flashbacks that say nothing.

Foster needed to work on his pacing (and his dialogue) a bit more. Only two -- two! -- scenes piqued my interest for the entire first 400 hundred pages, and they weren't enough on their own to keep me going. I would have quit if it hadn't been for the book club and sheer stubborness.

I'm on Page 406 right now; the human agencies have just figured out what the game is about, and they are about to take action to take over the ler reservation. It's a lousy place to stop, but it's 1:12 a.m., and I need to.

I haven't read prose this turgid since I was a newspaper editor. The book finally has my interest now that the nature of the game has been revealed, but it comes far too late in the book to justify the commitment. I will never read the other ler books.



Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Introducing the new Battlestar Galactica

It's been about two weeks since we borrowed the "Battlestar Galactica" revival DVD set from a friend of ours, and I'm still more than suitably impressed by how well it played out.

The original series, which starred Lorne Greene as Commander Adama, Dirk Benedict as Starbuck and Richard Hatch as Apollo, came out in 1978 after George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had launched a sci-fi revolution in American culture with "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." As sci-fi series go, the original "Battlestar Galactica" wasn't all that memorable. The plot of choice usually involved either the Cylons attacking and threatening the escaping Colonials, or a Gilligan's Island type of story where the Colonials thought they had discovered Earth and ended their quest, only to find they were wrong.

Characters were generally weak and unbelievable — Baltar was a larger-than-life evil person who had betrayed the colonies to the Cylons because he wanted to rule the survivors and had struck a deal with the Cylons to that effect. (Why he continued to work with the Cylons even after it was evident that they weren't going to honor their side was never really clear.) Starbuck was the hormone-driven womanizer, Apollo was the family man, and Adama was the all-around in-charge guy, who acted as visionary, high priest, military leader and top political official.

And if the characters lacked nuance at times, some of the show's spiritualism was just downright kooky, like that bit where the crystal city starts abducting Colonial vipers and their pilots and Starbuck meets an angel who tells him that one day he'll be a god, and all that weird stuff.

It was an odd show.

What was better about the new series? It's hard to know where to begin.

For starters, the new "Battlestar Galactica" miniseries gave us the view from the ground of the attack on the twelve colonies. The original series treated us to a tremendous space battle that began soon after the opening credits were over and we had established that Baltar had just negotiated a peace treaty between humanity and the Cylons.

Because this was a three-hour miniseries, the writers took some time to introduce us to each of the major characters and what drives them, and we got to witness the slaughter of the human population of Caprica — not by spaceships flying overhead and shooting lasers at people, but from a surprise nuclear bombardment. That's a much more accessible way to depict the genocide of the entire human species, particularly since 9-11 here in the United States and the terror attack in Spain last year, when many of us are wondering when the next shoe will drop.

The series also reimagined the Cylons. Since the war ended, the Cylons have altered their appearance so that they appear to be human, down to the blood level. They’re not shiny robots with a flashing red eye anymore; they're synthetic humans.

More than that, while the original-series Cylons were a reptilian race bent on the slaughter of humanity for reasons that never were expressed, these Cylons were created by humanity and gifted with intelligence. In other words, it's humanity's own creation attempting to destroy it — a familiar theme in science fiction but still a potent one since our penchant for advancing technology still outstrips our ability to use it by light years. Additionally, the Cylons' ability to pass among humans undetected easily lends itself to fifth column paranoia.

The big thing, though, has to be the way the series creators have reimagined the characters. Adama remains the confident military leader, but while the original Adama had a sterling relationship with his son and was able to maintain a professional rapport with no signs of favoritism or resentment, the new Adama and this Apollo have been estranged for at least two years after the death of Adama's other son, Zach.

Colonel Tigh, instead of being an exemplary executive officer, is past his time and a drunk.

Baltar is not a traitor with ambitions of power; he's just an amoral and self-serving twit who believes himself above the common burden of matters like conscience and guilt.

The Galactica itself is no longer the biggest or the best battlestar in the fleet. It's a run-down, ready-to-be-retired hulk, scheduled to be decommissioned and turned into a museum and so far past its prime that the Cylons are unable to hack into its computer system and shut it down like they do with the rest of the Colonial fleet.

The result it a sci-fi setting that is at once futuristic, with space travel and aliens, and retro, with ordnance, and a communications system that uses phone cords.

They also go rid of some of the cornier aspects of the show, like naming the planets after the Zodiac. The capital world is now called Caprica, not Capricorn. Gemini is now Geminon. Fanciful names like "Apollo" and "Starbuck" are the call signs of pilots Lee Adama and Kara Thrace.

As remakes go, this one is a keeper. I can't wait until I can borrow the first DVD set of the new series.

mars in the news

1) What was Mars like when it had water?
Wet.

2) What happened?

Somebody pulled the drain plug and let the water run out. There was a terrible glug-glug-glug noise that caused widespread panic across the planet, and Osayra was forced to unbody millions of hrossa, sorn and other creatures, including the funny frog ones with the P name and the humanoids from Edgar Rice Burrough's "John Carter" series.

No, seriously, the world tree drained all the water resources of Mars, and nearly did to Earth as well, but for the quick thinking of Hanville Svetz. If you don't believe me, read Larry Niven's historical novel, "Rainbow Mars," which provides an in-depth account.

colonizing space amid alien life

Would you take part in colonizing another world? It's meant as a serious sci-fi question.

I myself would love to, and probably if it were to come when I was in my early 20s, I would jump at the chance. Now that I'm 33, married and have two children -- and all that that entails -- reality almost certainly would prevent me from leaving, since that would mean uprooting all of us from all our friends, family and loved ones. The separation would be too irrevocable, and I don't think I'd be able to content myself just with lightspeed communication, given the number of years that would pass between communiques.

And since superluminal travel is out of the question, well, like I said, I couldn't see myself doing such a thing at this point in my life, though I would always think wistfully of our distant kin.

My initial thought would be a world where there is no other life, but the question of intelligent life on other worlds is an interesting one.

Someone -- I think it was Beethoven Brucker -- mentioned a story where a Christian missionary tried to bring the gospel to an alien race, who had no understanding of the Christian concept of sin. The evangelism didn't go very well. The aliens were utterly freaked out, and ended up crucifying the missionary, thereby introducing their own fall.

Ray Bradbury has done two stories on the subject. In one, "The Man," he has a crew of astronauts landing on a world where Christ has just been and just departed. I don't remember much else about it. I think it was included in "The October Country." His second one was in "The Martian Chronicles," and showed a missionary trying and utterly failing to interest the Martians in his religion since it was something they had no use for.

Some time ago I toyed with the idea of a story around space travelers encountering intelligent life on other worlds, only to discover that the intelligent life in question is human, having been there since humanity was scattered after the Tower of Babel. Still might be a story worth developing at some time.

In any event, I think the question of bringing sin to other planets is a moot one. I don't think there is life elsewhere, and if we talk about a barren planet, I don't think the planet will suffer much for being awakened by life. If there is life elsewhere, I rather imagine it's fallen too. If not, true, we would bring our own sin to it, but think of what we could learn of grace by mingling with an unfallen people.

mission: acheron

The scenario: You're preparing a ship that will travel at relativistic speeds to another star system with the express purpose of terraforming and colonizing another world. (We'll call it Acheron.) Figure it has lunar mass similar to ours to create a breathably thin atmosphere, gravity that is about 1.1 times Earth's gravity, and a single giant continent, with water covering about 65 percent of the world. Here's the catch: There is no life on this planet, which has a reducing (rather than oxydizing) atmosphere. Going on the old earth model, it's what our planet was two or three billion years ago. The land mass has cooled and solidified from the incessant rain, but the atmosphere at the moment is incapable of supporting terran life.

Obviously, that's your goal.

You have a crew of four dozen colonists, each trained in a scientific discipline that will be helpful to colonization or terraforming, and each possessing other abilities and interests that will allow useful diversions like entertainment. In cryogenic storage, you are taking the embryos of every known animal species¹ so you can establish and maintain balanced ecosystems, you are taking seeds from every known plant species,² as well as representatives of the Earth's other taxanomical kingdoms, as well as various other bits of equipment and machinery you will need.³

What equipment will you take? What sort of timetable do you project for each stage of the project? When will people be able to live on the planet? How do you see the colony developing?

One nice thing I see: very little in the way of transmittable disease. Since all the animals are being shipped as embryos, there will be no cases of avian flu or other such illnesses being passed up the food chain. The human colony also should be free of most extant human illnesses, since colonists presumably would be healthy when they depart. What illnesses do surface would be due more to genetics, nutrition and environmental contaminants, rather than viruses or bacteria. The first generation of animals probably will be somewhat retarded mentally, being as they'll be incubated and will lack the benefits of a placenta or the equivelant in their phylum, but even that will sort itself out in a generation or two.

¹ For purposes of simplification and to reduce costs, a species will be considered any two animals that can breed and produce offspring capable of breeding. Therefore, the "dogs" will be a genetic mix of all Earth's interbreedable dog species, including wolves, coyotes, dingoes, jackals and Canis familiaris. Similarly, tigons -- not lions and tigers -- are the great cat represented. (I think other great cats like leopards and cheetahs also may be interbreedable here, but I'm not sure.)^* The scientific assumption behind this is that habitat and natural selection are what led to the species divergence here on Earth, and that process will duplicate itself elsewhere. As for pedigree among domesticated animals, don't count on it. The wider the variety genetically, the healthier the herd.

² Again, some consolidation is likely. I'm not as familiar with the taxonomy of Plantae, but I imagine some of the same geographical biases in species designation have come into play there as well.

³ Machinery obviously will be more advanced than anything we now have at the dawn of the 21st century, but should be theoretically achievable. I'd accept giant machines capable of producing chemical changes in the air to produce oxygen, for example, but not warp drive, transporters or replicators. I'm talking sci-fi here, not science fantasy.

^* Does anyone know of any other such combinations? This is actually an interesting point for me, because I think it's relevant for discussions of Noah's ark. If tigers and lions are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring -- as they are -- I would argue that they better are classified as breeds of the same species, rather than as separate species. Keeping that sort of thing in mind, it quickly becomes obvious that the task of getting the animals on the Ark wasn't quite as impossible as some skeptics claim.