“Let us always keep before our mind’s eye an overheated and glowing stove and inside a naked man, supine, who will never be released from such pain. Does not his pain appear unbearable to us for even a single moment?”
Thus wrote the 15th-century theologian and mystic Denis the Carthusian in his tract about the Last Judgment, De quatuor hominis novissimus. When I encountered the passage in Johan Huizinga’s The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919), another, more recent book came to mind: Iain M. Banks’s science fiction novel, Surface Detail (2010).
The novel’s action takes place in our galaxy in AD 2970. By then, technology has reached the point that a person’s consciousness can be recorded and inserted into virtual, simulated worlds—including hells of such fiendishly imaginative gruesomeness that I’ll refrain from quoting a description. Some of the galaxy’s species support the hells as an effective means to discourage bad behavior; others decry them as a moral outrage. To settle the hells’ disputed existence, the various interested species have agreed to abide by the outcome of a vast simulated war game.
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