Escape from Hell, Niven and Pournelle’s sequel to Inferno, came out earlier this month, and I’m about 90% through. Is anyone else reading, or already finished it?
I’m enjoying it quite a bit, personally, and think I may like it just as much as the original.
See what happens when you are out of the country for a while? I had no idea this was coming out. I would have to go back and read Inferno again. I enjoyed it but I remember it was very inside. Is there an annotated version or someplace that explains all the references?
Ha, I just got through rereading Inferno as a bedtime story for Mrs M, looked it up on Wikipedia and saw about Escape from Hell there. No spoilers please!!
Loach, how about an Inferno discussion thread? I’m sure between us we could thrash out most of it.
I read it sometime around when it came out. I would need to reread before I could have a meaningful discussion on it. There don’t seem to be too many copies of it in Baghdad at the moment.
Thanks for the info! This is on my ‘buy’ list now.
Man, read that about 30 years ago. Last I remember the protagonist and
Mussolini were climbing the devil’s body in an attempt to get out.
[For those who haven’t even read the first one]
Even tho Pournelle has pissed me off in some ways in the interim, I may still give it a shot if spotted at the bookstore today.
They are pretty good about giving brief overviews of a character’s significance if you’re being reacquainted with one from *Inferno *but they also included a dramatis personae at the beginning of the book.
Even having read the original just last month, I often referred back to it.
You may want to request a mod edit to obscur who Carpenter’s guide was. My re-issue gave it away in the synopsis, but not all editions do.
I hope the sequel doesn’t renege on how Carpenter’s character developed over the course of Inferno (mild spoilers): At first, being a rationalist skeptic, Carpenter found it easier to believe that this was someone’s Clarke-level simulation of Hell. But eventually he decides that it really is the real Hell. And at the end, he acknowledges that he’s still in rebellion against God because he can’t accept the justice of people being damned to eternal punishment without hope. He has to see if at least in principle anyone in Hell could be saved.
It’s really not much of a spoiler. Anybody with three functioning brain cells should know who the guide is from his first introduction and description. 
I have four functioning brain cells, and It took me quite a while to figure it out (although my Mother got it right away). I suspect that many people reading it today would have absolutely no clue.
I just finished it yesterday. Pretty damn good, not as iconic as the 1st.
The map could be better, the character list is very good, and the quotes from Dante are useful and interesting.
It didn’t. That’s the entire basis of the sequel.
I just finished it, and am about halfway through a re-read.
It probably wasn’t necessary to write a sequel, but they do take the story in some interesting directions. I could have done without a few of the conservative polemics - and I’m a conservative.
Done. I moved his name into the spoiler tag.
Incidentally, I know a number of younger readers who didn’t figure out who the guide was until quite late in the book. That first name isn’t as prominent in their minds as it is to the older folks.
I just re-read Inferno and I’m getting ready to read the sequel. I’ll post more later.
The name was kinda obvious to me. Probably because I teach European History rather than my not-quite-that-advanced-thank-you-very-much-age.
Sorry guys, I thought that the Character in Question was IDed pretty early on in the 1st novel, but I remember now that he wasn’t specifically named (fully) until towards the end (tho I being a WWII buff got it pretty early on, and his encounter with one of his former “peers” in a mud pit was amusing).
What types of “conservative polemics” are we talking about? That’s why I am a little reluctant to buy it (did see it today on the racks)-Pournelle just can’t resist the temptation of that ol’ soapbox anymore. I guess his politics weren’t nearly as obvious back when he had that column in Galaxy, or perhaps I can chalk that up to youthful naivete’.