John Clutes kolumnd om Ted Chiangs bok som vi dikuterade idag var läsvärd:
http://www.scifi.com/sfw/issue273/excess.html
Citat ur den rörande "Hell is the Absence of God":
If these tales, even "Story of Your Life," lack something, it may be a full execution of the spiraling growth of intimacy between lives led and life understood. The most savagely affecting story in the book, and therefore in Chiang's work to date, is the one in which fate and understanding are most implacably interwoven. "Hell Is the Absence of God" (2001), which never raises its voice for an instant, may be the most devastating exposure of the putative nature of religion that has ever been penned. Its strategy is the strategy that underlies all of Chiang's stories: that of taking a premise about the nature of the world to be the case, and unpacking it.
In the world of "Hell" God does in fact literally exist, as do his angels, whose visitations upon the Earth are like plane crashesthose in the path of an angel landing are very likely to be maimed or killed, though at the same time, arbitrarily, miracles can occur. The protagonist of the tale, Neil Fisk, has been happily married for some time. Although he believes in Godin this story not to believe in God would to be like not believing in waterhe does not love him. Then his wife is killed in an angel visitation, and the witnesses of her death confirm that she is one of the three casualties whose soul has been accepted into heaven. But only those who love God can go to heaven; those who do not love God go to hell, which is a precinct below reality, easily viewable. God cannot perceive those who go to hell. Therefore they remain in hell forever.
Through excruciations and epiphanies, gains and losses and turnarounds, and through an utterly uncontrovertible witnessing on his part of the nature of the deity, Neil comes to love God, and therefore himself becomes capable of ascending to heaven, where his beloved wife (God is real) really awaits him. His witnessing of the reality of God has inevitably proven fatalactually to witness heaven, which opens when an angel bursts into the world, is to burn to ashes like Semelebut he loves God, and those who die loving God in this fashion go to heaven. But in Neil's case, inscrutably (God is God, go figure), this does not happen. He goes instead to hell. God, being absent from hell, forever, cannot perceive Neil. But Neil, having witnessed the reality of God, cannot stop perceiving the absence of God, and is in constant agony from the absence of God, forever. Moreover, because to see God is to love God, Neil cannot even stop loving God, forever. "That is the nature of true devotion."