I also seem to remember that the story went on to say that Crowley at one point had been praised for his work in the Spanish Inquisition. That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about.

That kind of abrupt tonal slam, from comedy to horror, leaving the reader feeling something like they just had a bucket of cold water unexpectedly poured over them, is classic Sir Pterry too. I read the Discworld series start-to-finish earlier this year as a minor bucket-list project, and I wish he was still around. He had a commendable simmering rage against the powerful and callous that boiled over often, and that's something we could use more of today.

I also did not expect to write a comment today using the word "bucket" in two unrelated idioms, but here we are.

> I also seem to remember that the story went on to say that Crowley at one point had been praised for his work in the Spanish Inquisition. That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about.

Well, it makes sense that demons wouldn't want to think about strict judicial procedure and rules of evidence.

If you think the main thing of the Spanish Inquisition was strict judicial procedure and rules of evidence, you might want to seek treatment.

I think it's a joke, the punchline being the suggestion that that's what offended the demon in the story

>That was the first he'd actually heard of it--humans had come up with it on their own--so he went and had a look, and then went and got blind drunk, because there are some things even demons would rather not think about.

This seems like one of the things you might say to diss humans, but which doesn't actually make sense when you think about it. I don't believe for one moment that an actual demon, who does the kind of evil things we normally think of demons as doing, would find human evils shocking, let alone unthinkable. The whole point of being a demon is being and doing evil. If the demon can't comprehend some human evil, he's a failure as a demon.

It can at most make sense as a joke. It makes too little sense taken seriously to actually be horror.

It's not that the demons found it appalling per se, but rather that they lacked imagination to come up with the more creative stuff that humans did to each other.

"Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.

One of them had written it, hadn’t he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”

Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.

That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.

And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger."

It does make more sense in context. Crowley isn't a stereotypical evil demon and could reasonably be considered a failure as a demon.

I think the horror comes from the thought that a being whose entire job is to come up with new and clever ways to bring about human misery and suffering is so thoroughly out-classed. The idea that humanity doesn't need an outside influence to inflict such evil is horrific. The joke is just there as window dressing to contrast the real horrors of our collective history.

Well yeah, the point is not to make _literal_ sense, this whole book is fiction, not technical writing. It's OK in that context to use devices like hyperbole and irony. A previous author, can't remember who and don't feel like googling, wrote a line in a similar spirit: "Hell is empty and the devils are here". He didn't mean that there were actual demons walking around on earth, who had left a physical place named Hell, which was at the moment unpopulated.

To be fair, no one expects the Spanish Inquisition...

...I'll show myself out.

> my money is on that joke being written by Pratchett, it fits his kind of satire so perfectly

Pretty sure it was written by Gaiman. I’m not finding the interview where he said this, but (if memory serves) Gaiman wrote that part of the story and had shelved it when Pratchett contacted him:

— Do you have plans for that thing you sent me?

— Not really, why?

— Because I know what happens next. So either sell me the rights to it or write it with me.

And then continued the interview with something like “and because I’m not an idiot, I didn’t pass up the opportunity to write something with him”.

Unless I misunderstand you I think you're talking about the story (or perhaps that chapter) as a whole, and I'm talking about one particular passage in that story

> I'm talking about one particular passage in that story

Gaiman’s initial draft may have included more by the time they had the conversation, but the moment I remember from the interview was specifically about that conversation amongst the demons. It stuck with me because I found the idea funny and it’s what made me want to take a look at Good Omens.

Oh wow, really? Heh, guess I underestimated Gaiman then! That could explain why it appealed to Pratchett though :D

This joke was originally written by CS Lewis in The Screwtape Letters.

Now that you mention it, I do remember one author--pretty sure it was Gaiman re Good Omens--say that the parts you'd think were him were mostly the other author, and vice versa.

Reminds me of Supernatural's Crowley optimizing hell to just be one big line where everyone just has to stand and wait. The simpler solution.

How would we describe the state of standing and waiting for all eternity? Being in limbo, perhaps?

No, being in limbo is when you try to bend backwards under a stick for all eternity.

[shows self out]

Inthinkblimbo would be waiting alone. This is waiting with people you can communicate with. Thats right. Hell is other people.

I would suggest double-checking this intuition with Dante.

The British remake of "The Room" by Sartre

So, Disneyworld?

I bet he had read The Screwtape Letters though.

and, considering to whom the book was dedicated, some other famous english apologists as well.

I was wondering if they were the first to comment on this, or if this is a problem that has been satirized for much longer! :)

I need to check, are you sarcastic? I have so far avoided Lewis due to an impression (way too old impression to remember where I got it, may be unfounded or not) of the texts being close to christian/religious zealotry?

I'm not trying to guess why you would say that (and by that, I mean the fact that you would avoid writing because it's trying to preach to you), and I do want to say that Lewis is, overall, very close to proselytizing in his writings (generally it's pretty explicitly stated that's what he wants to do). But.

Avoiding something because it disagrees with your worldview, or because it is 'too close to [insert literally anything here]' is not a great way to expand your understanding of the world. Being exposed to things you disagree with is step 1 in understanding how or why they exist, with few exceptions (CP, explicit hate speech, most calls to violence, those sorts of things).

Read the screwtape letters. Yes, they're intended to make you consider your immortal soul and embrace Christianity. But also yes, it's an amazing piece of literature.

That said,"Letters From the Earth" by Mark Twain is an excellent companion volume to the Screwtape Letters, taking an opposite position (and from the perspective of a somewhat more exalted demon).

Well, I consider myself being relatively open to all kinds of new ideas. But at some point you need to realize that certain genre is not going to give you any new insights and it's better to move on. For example, I have read total of three books published by CATO Institute, and and by standard Bayesian rules, it is going to take a lot of convincing to give them one more chance.

Then read 3 CS Lewis books starting with Screwtape and see if this is true for that as well. Quite slim books, top.

> But also yes, it's an amazing piece of literature.

I think you are overselling. It's worth a read, but the writing is often stilted and repetitive, the central conceit interesting but tired by the end. It's not a long book, but probably would have been better as a shorter form.

Yes, that draining of energy towards the end is the anti-theist critism of the novel and philosophy. Quite a few essays have been written about how even this great intellectual peters out his reasoning and just repeats.

Not sarcastic. The Screwtape Letters is important literature because it was praised at publication, became lauded, and is an complete intellectual failure. The Screwtape Letters stands as a milestone of logrolling: the practice of approval due to who authored something rather than what the writing actually contains. The Screwtape Letters is a debate exposing one of the several weak intellectual foundations of Christian philosophy - but none of that critism was socially allowed for many decades. Such critism still causes many a panty to bunch. The Screwtape Letters is important because it is weak intellectualism, wrapped up in pretty good writing, but not good enough to disguise its intellectual bankruptcy, yet it still lauded.

I haven’t read everything he ever wrote, but I think that most of his books are just fantasies, or perhaps early science fiction (Out of the Dark Planet). Many of them are allegorical; you might see parallels between them and concepts or elements from the Bible, or you might ignore that and just enjoy the story. I think you could enjoy The Screwtape Letters in the same way you would enjoy Good Omens, as a fantasy that has demons in it.

the whole point of the screwtape letters is defending christianity. I know it's wikipedia, but wikipedia says it's christian apologetics in the first sentence, and goodreads says it's religious satire in the first sentence.

I mean he was a Christian and he did believe strongly in it and tried to share his beliefs with others. I'm not sure if I would call that zealotry though.

This doesn't work even as a joke.

Not a joke; the Screwtape Letters is a seminal piece of literature, forget the written story, the story is the context of the novel, it's intention, it's composition, and it's ultimate weakness as a intellectual milepost. It practically destroys itself. It's a masterpiece of self deception.

I am intrigued. How does the book practically destroy itself?

It doesn't destroy anything lol, it's just bog-standard, annoying, heavy-handed, Western Christian cringe thinly describing itself as apologetics. It's annoying as fuck when people pretend it's literature or something.

There are too many good books in the world for having read them all to be any kind of a reasonably attainable barrier to entry for authors.

And then crowley’s utter and abject horror at the discovery of what we can do to ourselves, no Hell involved at all.

I also seem to remember that Crowley had a hand in the shape of the M25 to help maximise misery.

Found this on the wiki page for the M25.

>The M25 plays a role in the comedy-fantasy novel Good Omens, as "evidence for the hidden hand of Satan in the affairs of Man".[14] The demon character, Crowley, had manipulated the design of the M25 to resemble a Satanic sigil, and tried to ensure it would anger as many people as possible to drive them off the path of good.[122][123] The lengthy series of public inquiries for motorways throughout the 1970s, particularly the M25, influenced the opening of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where the Earth is destroyed to make way for a hyperspace bypass.[124]