After 'The Mote in God's Eye' (which came over to me like a very well-detailed Star Trek episode), this book was a surprise - satire, and specifically satire centring on the science fiction fan world. (By 'centring', I don't mean that that was its focus; rather, I use 'centring' in a dynamic sense, meaning that the science-fictional explanation is the one the protagonist keeps trying to get back to, and also one the authors keep returning to for some of the examples of the damned they show us in Hell) (or in the science fiction convention the novel starts in, which may or may not be the same!).

Written in 1976, there will be aspects of this novel which don't sit easily with present-day readers, but I was amazed when I first read it on release. ( )

A fun romp through hell that carries a surprisingly worthwhile interpretation of modern hell. Having read Dante's Inferno helps. The narrator is excellent as well and I think listening to the book was much better than reading it would have been. ( )

I wasn’t sure I would like this book. I liked Dante’s Inferno well enough, more for its classical, mythology and historical references than for its theology, which was mostly lost on this 21st-century Reformed Protestant. But the idea of Dante’s Inferno being rewritten with a 20th-century science fiction author being led through Hell by Benito Mussolini (!) intrigued me enough to try it. And I really enjoyed it – read it straight through one evening.

It’s a crazy ride through Dante’s vision of Hell (which I don’t remember well enough to compare, but it seems similar enough) updated for the 20th century with a modern, scientific, agnostic/atheist, “a good and loving God would never send people to Hell” protagonist who spends most of his journey trying to figure out scientific or scifi explanations for what he’s seeing (his general assumption being that some future, scientifically advanced human or alien "builders" have created an Infernoland, kind of a hellish Disneyland. I loved that.)

And, as a Christian, I wasn’t really expecting it to make me think about my theology much, but there were a lot of times I had to stop and ponder some things. Whether I agreed with it or not, I appreciated how the story made me think. The authors in the afterward stated they were using “(C. S.) Lewis’s theology and Dante’s geography” for Inferno, based on Lewis’s “The Great Divorce” which I haven’t read, but now want to.

If you like these authors at all, this is a good book to try. If you’ve read Dante’s Inferno, loved it or hated it, you’ll enjoy this book. If you read this and haven’t read Dante’s Inferno, you’ll probably want to read that, too. The sequel, “Escape From Hell,” has gotten mixed reviews, but I will probably try it.

This is the 2008 Kindle version – I had no problems with it on my Kindle, could even read the labels on the illustration of the 9 circles of hell at the beginning of the book on my Kindle II. ( )

I couldn't finish either this or Escape from Hell. I'm a big fan of both these boys but whenever they focus on current events it turns into a parade of straw men dutifully set up and knocked back down. Boring. If Carl Sagan was alive today he'd kick both their butts!

I returned to this (having read it serialized in Galaxy magazine when it first came out back in the 70's) after reading Dante. It was fun, as I remembered, and a little corny/dated, and surprising Universalist! I'll be reading the sequel coming up (Escape from Hell) in February 2009. ( )