Escape from Hell (Inferno #2) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Jennifer Hanover (Illustrator)
Allan Carpenter escaped from hell once but remained haunted by what he saw and endured. He has now returned, on a mission to liberate those souls unfairly tortured and confined. Partnering with the legendary poet and suicide, Sylvia Plath, Carpenter is a modern-day Christ who intends to harrow hell and free the damned. But now that he's returned to this Dantesque Inferno, can he ever again leave?
I was quite disappointed to this sequel to Inferno. First, because it’s basically a longer version of the first book. Carpenter makes his way through the many layers of hell, the only difference being that now instead of being the one led, he’s leading someone else. Second, because the ending is something of a cheat. After going from danger to danger, the reader is left wondering what comes next. Thirdly, their biases against certain beliefs and some of their contemporaries are glaringly obvious.
The worst of that is their description of Carl Sagan and his work. His warning against nuclear winter are presented here as flip-flopping on global warming. The fact that the two are totally different fields of study doesn’t seem to matter. Or that he was proved right on both account (sort of like their blasting of the hole in the ozone layer theory in Lucifer’s Hammer,) is also ignored.
At times the book was pleasantly readable. At other times, their proselytizing got to be too much.
Mount TBR 2024 Book Links
Links are to more information regarding each book or author, not to the review.
1. Bone Walker (Anasazi Mysteries #3) by Kathleen O'Neal Gear, W. Michael Gear
2. Holly by Stephen King
3. Inferno (Inferno#1) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle
4. Fallout (Lois Lane #1) by Gwenda Bond
5. The Secret People by John Wyndham
6. Certain Dark Things by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
7. Gods of Jade and Shadow by Silvia Moreno-Garcia
8. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
9. Psyche and Eros by Luna McNamara
10. Count Down: How Our Modern World Is Threatening Sperm Counts by Shanna H. Swan, Stacey Colino
11. Vampires of El Norte by Isabel Cañas
12. Night Songs by Charles L. Grant
13. President Garfield: From Radical to Unifier by C.W. Goodyear
14. The City of Mirrors by Justin Cronin
15. Mine by Robert R. McCammon
16. Time Travelers Never Die by Jack McDevitt
17. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
18. The Plots Against the President: FDR, A Nation in Crisis, and the Rise of the American Right by Sally Denton
19. The North Woods by Douglass Hoover
20. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
21. Upon Dark Waters by Robert Radcliffe
22. Dread: 22 Tales of Terror by Kevin Bachar
23. Escape from Hell (Inferno #2) by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, Jennifer Hanover (Illustrator)
