“Hell is the Absence of God” won both the 2002 Hugo and the 2002 Nebula for Best Novelette.
Second paragraph of third section:
What people assumed about Neil had in fact happened to Janice. When Janice’s mother was eight months pregnant with her, she lost control of the car she was driving and collided with a telephone pole during a sudden hailstorm, fists of ice dropping out of a clear blue sky and littering the road like a spill of giant ball bearings. She was sitting in her car, shaken but unhurt, when she saw a knot of silver flames—later identified as the angel Bardiel—float across the sky. The sight petrified her, but not so much that she didn’t notice the peculiar settling sensation in her womb. A subsequent ultrasound revealed that the unborn Janice Reilly no longer had legs; flipperlike feet grew directly from her hip sockets.
Back in 2006, I wrote of this story:
“Hell Is the Absence of God” is a story set in a world very like ours, but where there is no doubt about whether angels, Heaven and Hell are all real. This does raise an interesting question as to whether it can be counted as fantasy or science fiction; Chiang himself is clear that he sees the work as fantasy, but as Jeremy Smith and Niall Harrison [dead link] have argued, apart from the supernatural premise, the world he has created is a pretty mechanistic one, with angels behaving like natural forces (what an earlier age termed “acts of God”); there is no means of mediating with them. (There is, however, a possibility of interaction directly with God, which must surely undermine the classification of the story as science fiction rather than fantasy.)
But the story is not about God or angels. It is about what it is like to be human in this world, and in particular on the nature of devotion and religion when faith is no longer an issue. Only those who love God can go to Heaven; Hell, however, is not a place of torment, but simply somewhere “not physically worse than the mortal plane”, occasionally visible below our own world, characterised by (as we are told in the story’s title) the absence of God.
This is not a story about Christianity, not even about evangelical Christianity, though a lot of people have made that mistake (including me when I first read it, and the writer of the blurb for one of the collections it has been published in). Explicitly, Christ is not mentioned anywhere in the text. Implicitly, faith as such has been taken out of the equation by the empirical and undeniable proofs of God’s existence. There are no unbelievers in Chiang’s world. There are, however, people who are not religious.
Some readers didn’t get this crucial point, including John C. Wright on the Amazon site, who calls it “trite antichristian propaganda” and William December Starr on usenet [dead link], who described is as “just yet another “God’s a jerk” story, big deal”. (Elf Sternberg has repeatedly praised it for much the same reasons, suggesting that Chiang is telling exactly the same story here as C.S. Lewis in The Great Divorce, but from a different perspective.) I find it rather interesting that those readers who react to the story as thin anti-Christian propaganda tend to also describe themselves as non-believers. I haven’t yet found a Christian writer who had the same reaction, though it will be interesting to see what Mirtika Schulz’s group [dead link] makes of it when they get there. (Kathy Wang [dead link] actually thought it a pro-Christian, proselytising story at first, though realised her mistake on further reading.) My suspicion is that for most believers, and for some non-believers (and perhaps for anyone who is interested in exploring the spectrum of opinion between Richard Dawkins and Billy Graham, rather than pledging their allegiance to one side or the other), Chiang’s thought-experiment is in fact an interesting one.
It is made more interesting by the style of narrative – tight third-person, but with no direct speech at all. It gives the story some of the qualities of a documentary: it is as if the camera focusses on each person individually, and then moves on. There are three main characters: Neil Fisk, introduced in the first sentence, whose wife is killed by an angelic visitation and whose quest to become devoted to God in order to join her in heaven is the core of the plot; Janice Reilly, disabled and then cured, whose career as a motivational speaker is bound up with Neil’s quest; and Ethan Mead, whose quest for meaning in the world is perhaps meant to be closest to the experience of the reader. Through the characters, Chiang also explores grief [dead link] and disability [dead link], both of which are of course key elements in the eternal question of why a loving God allows bad things to happen in the world. Again, Chiang is not trying to answer this question himself, but he is exploring how people do answer it, in a world where “God doesn’t exist” is not an option. He is also by his own account, if to a very small extent, exploring the role of God.
Chiang has in fact written up the roots of this story, in an afterword in his Stories of Your Life and Others collection. He mentions briefly Gregory Widen’s film, The Prophecy, and the work of modern mystic Annie Dillard, but then goes on to devote two paragraphs (out of four in the short piece) to the Book of Job.
For me, one of the unsatisfying things about the Book of Job is that, in the end, God rewards Job. Leave aside the question of whether new children can compensate for the loss of his original ones. Why does God restore Job’s fortunes at all? Why the happy ending? One of the basic message of the book is that virtue isn’t always rewarded; bad things happen to good people. Job ultimately accepts this, demonstrating virtue, and is subsequently rewarded. Doesn’t this undercut the message?
It seems to me that the Book of Job lacks the courage of its convictions. If the author were really committed to the idea that virtue isn’t always rewarded, shouldn’t the book have ended with Job still bereft of everything?
The Book of Job is one of the most interesting and puzzling parts of the Bible (and, according to one reference work I consulted, the one book whose text is most corrupt). Job, an upright and honest man, is inflicted with tremendous suffering by Satan as part of a wager with God (Satan betting that suffering will make Job turn against God). Much poetry ensues, Job’s friends attempting to persuade him that his suffering is just punishment for something, Job himself asserts his own righteousness, and then God Himself appears in a whirlwind; Job is overwhelmed by the divine presence, and the book ends as Chiang describes it.
Apologists for the Book of Job can of course mutter that the original text may well have concluded without this disappointing and inconsistent happy ending. The prose narrative of verses 7-17 of the last chapter has the feel of being by a different hand to most of the rest of the book (perhaps the two introductory chapters are from the same source or a similar one). But Chiang is right. The text we have is the one we have, not what one might wish it to be, and the ending is inconsistent. His choice of ending for his story – where Neil Fisk is, as we would see it, unfairly damned by God, is a direct response to the climax of the Biblical story, where Job is, as Chiang sees it, unfairly saved.
In a different year, one could imagine that the Hugo and/or Nebula might have gone either to a traditional hard sf story like Allen Steele’s tale of the one man who wakes up on a starship where everyone else is asleep in cold storage, or to Charles Stross’ vibrant vision of the the founder of a post-Singularity, post-human dynasty. I think it would have had a good chance of winning anyway – I tipped it for the Hugo myself, and scoffed at those who felt it was unworthy of the Nebula. But (I owe this point to Glenn Gillette [dead link]) in the months after September 2001, Chiang’s tale of humans trying to come to terms with tragedy and disaster happened to hit the Zeitgeist in a way that (I hope) he never anticipated, and this must have made a difference with the voters of both SFWA and Worldcon.
Nineteen years on, I agree with myself and I don’t have much to add. I think the story remains a really good thought experiment, emotionally charged yet sparsely written, with perhaps some understated rage at an irrationally cruel world and its creator.
One point I should have made is that the angels, who are impersonal forces of disruption and often destruction, are given names by the human onlookers to their passage, even though there is no hint that they actually have any personalities or intelligence, exactly as we give names to hurricanes. It raises the question, to what extent do we really know anything, let alone control it, by giving it a name?
I have it in the collection Stories of your Life and Others, which you can get here (also for sale under the variant title Arrival). Back in the days of FictionWise, you could get it separately, but that’s long gone now.
Other novelettes on final ballot for both Hugo and Nebula: “The Days Between”, by Allen Steele and “Lobsters”, by Charles Stross.
Other novelettes on final ballot for Hugo: “Undone”, by James Patrick Kelly and “The Return of Spring”, by Shane Tourtellotte.
Other novelettes on final ballot for Nebula: “The Pagodas of Ciboure”, by M. Shayne Bell; “The Ferryman’s Wife”, by Richard Bowes; and “Madonna of the Maquiladora”, by Gregory Frost.
Other winners of 2002 Hugos: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (best novel); “Fast Times at Fairmont High”, by Vernor Vinge (best novella); “The Dog Said Bow-Wow” by Michael Swanwick (best short story); The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dramatic presentation).
Other winners of 2002 Nebulas: American Gods, by Neil Gaiman (best novel); “Bronte’s Egg”, by Richard Chwedyk (best novella); “Creature”, by Carol Emshwiller (best short story); The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (dramatic presentation).
Normally I’m reviewing joint Hugo and Nebula winners from the same year together, but I don’t feel like revisiting American Gods right now. For the same reason, I’m going to skip Coraline, which won both the 2003 Hugo and the 2003 Nebula for Best Novella, and will go on to Paladin of Souls, by Lois McMaster Bujold, for my next write-up in this sequence.
