In some ways, it also represented Niven’s lamentable descent into travelogue instead of plot. Inferno was interesting, if not quite great. Carpenter’s guide was, well, that’s a surprise, but let’s just say he was Italian also. Dante’s guide was Virgil, the great Roman poet. instead of Dante, the narrator was the fictional Alan Carpentier, nee Carpenter, a pedestrian science fiction writer. In 1976, Niven and Pournelle published their version of Inferno, a modern re-working of the first book of Dante’s opus. They have written absolutely top notch novels of first contact with aliens ( The Mote in God’s Eye), alien invasion ( Footfall) and doomsday meteor strike ( Lucifer’s Hammer). Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle are one of the truly great science fiction writing collaborators in history. And demonstrated to WC that the first book of The Divine Comedy, “Inferno,” was by far the most interesting. Those engravings were dark, gruesome and vivid they were fascinating to a teenager, and sucked WC in to Dante’s great work. WC’s parents had a 1948 edition of the White translation of Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the one with the Doré engravings.
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