Well, this was an absolute banger!

I definitely need more time to digest this and really try to get where Chiang is coming from and trying to say with this, but I know how easily influenced I am, so I wanted to get my initial thoughts down, before anything else.

Hell is the Absence of God posits a world where some form of the monotheistic God of Christianity and other major religions, along with a whole bunch of named angels, heaven and Hell all explicitly exist. This manifests itself in angels and other holy events and visions, including a look into heaven and Hell, randomly occurring all over the place, seemingly on the regular. The sudden appearance of angels sews as much awfulness as it does aww, seeming to have no rhyme or reason for the most part, causing indiscriminate horror in the form of accidents, mutations, injury and deaths, as well as showing visions of loved ones in heaven or Hell. The holy episodes are not wholly catastrophic with others being healed, blessed, and witnessing miracles…that also have the potential to destroy lives and shaken faith.

This novelette asks what would living in this world do to a motherfucker, regardless of their original feelings about God? Nothing good, seems to be the answer.

Now, I totally get that this is one of those works of art that the New Atheists and various other big brained bois who think Dawkins and Gervais are the greatest minds of our generation and that Rick Sanchez is nothing, but cool and awesome, actually (this is something that Rick and Morty is also guilty of, despite their attempts to show how fucked a person he is), I get that. I don't think it's fair to judge something on the way the worst people react to something and interpret it. People with shitty perspectives like great things and people with decent perspectives like things that are awful (it's me, I'm bitches).

Is Death of the Audience a thing? Who knows, because this is the unfiltered and not looking shit up zone. Anyways, the point was just to acknowledge that there are various ways to interpret this story and the way it's told, including as being an outright mockery of religion, particularly Christianity, or conversely an argument for faith not needing proof, and it all being about love and pain and loving pain.


Spoilers and more initial reaction here: https://ko-fi.com/post/Hell-is-the-Absence-of-God-by-Ted-Chiang--Book-Re-B0B5R6W... ( )

Wow. It's certainly a new literary experience for me. If all those religious magic-realism stuff in Garcia Marquez's 'Hundred Years...' were to be compiled into one story universe and its logic followed to their conclusion, it would be the setting of this story.

I liked the very personal tone. You feel the conflicts and motivations of the characters immediately. In the face of assured eternity, where there's no longer doubt that heaven and hell exists, all that matters is the attitude one has. This is what I got from the story. Camus. Myth of Sisyphus.

Overall a great read. Philosophical, sad, and a sincere meditation on the issue of faith. ( )

This was... well... not very good. Or, well, it won a Hugo and a Nebula, so I guess on an objective level it's good, but I didn't enjoy it as much as I wanted to. It's got an extremely interesting premise: in a world where miracles, visitations by angels, and manifestations of hell are common, a man's wife is killed in a visitation. She's in heaven, but he's not religious. He needs to love God to get to heaven to be with his wife, but how can he love God now that He's taken everything? It sounds like the kind of story I should have loved, but I was really unclear on what the point and/or message of this story was, beyond "God's an arbitrary jerk, but it's important to love him unconditionally anyways." The story also switched between POVs frequently and I had a bit of a hard time keeping things straight.

Certainly well-written but rather depressing and odd. I didn't exactly enjoy it, but I did enjoy it, if you know what I mean. ( )

I've enjoyed the setting but the ending is horrifying, not by it's quality, but in the message that "God is a jerk, but that's not the point". Depressing. ( )