Nice irony, especially if you’ve read Plath’s poetry. The first half of the novel has Carpenter tell the story of his failures to Plath.

And the tree turns out to hold the spirit of Sylvia Plath. The despairing would-be rescuer of souls reclines on the roots of a tree in the Wood of Suicides. In the overwrought title, Escape from Hell, Niven and Pournelle revisit Alan Carpenter as he tries to put into effect the ideas he developed in “Inferno.” They don’t involve any escape from Hell quite the opposite.Īgain, the novel has its moments. There was no need for a sequel.īut go back we did. The novel was a complete work there was no real need to go back. You know, “Inferno on $5 A Day.” But the novel also had some excellent moments, including the apparent ramblings of a mad psychiatrist, who turned out to understand the real purpose of Hell, or at least of Niven’s modern Inferno. In some ways, it also represented Niven’s lamentable descent into travelogue instead of plot.

Inferno was interesting, if not quite great. Carpenter’s guide was, well, that’s a surprise, but let’s just say he was Italian also. Dante’s guide was Virgil, the great Roman poet. instead of Dante, the narrator was the fictional Alan Carpentier, nee Carpenter, a pedestrian science fiction writer. In 1976, Niven and Pournelle published their version of Inferno, a modern re-working of the first book of Dante’s opus. They have written absolutely top notch novels of first contact with aliens ( The Mote in God’s Eye), alien invasion ( Footfall) and doomsday meteor strike ( Lucifer’s Hammer). Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are one of the truly great science fiction writing collaborators in history. And demonstrated to WC that the first book of The Divine Comedy, “Inferno,” was by far the most interesting. Those engravings were dark, gruesome and vivid they were fascinating to a teenager, and sucked WC in to Dante’s great work. WC’s parents had a 1948 edition of the White translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the one with the Doré engravings.

Escape from hell niven