(6) LARRY NIVEN & JERRY POURNELLE –
INFERNO (1976)

Another posthumous or afterlife fantasy which I rank in my Top 10 SF, because I make my own rules and break them anyway.

Also because Niven and Pournelle wrote extensively in SF, both separately and in collaboration with each other, and I read them there first – notably Lucifer’s Hammer, Footfall and The Legacy of Heorot (Beowulf IN SPACE!).

Niven is perhaps most famouse for his SF novel Ringworld (and sequels or series) but he was also a deft hand at fantasy, most strikingly with The Magic Goes Away, in which a prehistoric fantasy Earth has a magical energy crisis (and which also named the trope in TV Tropes for magic waning from a fantasy world). I also have a soft spot for Pournelle’s Janissaries.

But back to their collaborative posthumous fantasy, the afterlife setting is the literal Inferno – as in Dante’s Inferno, literally updated in all its infernal glory of its nine circles of hell, from the perspective of SF author John Carpentier (or is that Carpenter?) who dies and finds himself in it.

However, abandon not all hope ye who enter there, as he is led on a quest from its outermost levels to its innermost depths with Satan himself – a quest for the way out of hell, as told in the original Inferno by Dante. And playing Virgil to his Dante is a figure that may catch some by surprise, although it was obvious to me at the outset from historical association and that he has read Dante in Italian, but even so was compelling (and I’d like to believe that he did indeed find redemption leading lost souls out of Hell).

FANTASY & HORROR

The protagonist – literally a posthumous SF writer – comes to realise that he is in fantasy rather than SF. And given that it is hell, there are elements of horror, even if they are not used as such.

RATING : 4 STARS****
A-TIER (TOP TIER)