The Devil's Day

Blish, James.  Devil's Day, The. New York: Baen Fantasy, [ca. 1971]. Collects JB's Black Easter OR, Faustus Aleph-Null (1968) and The Day After Judgment (1971).

Theological fantasy, relevant here fpr the high-tech battle by US forces against the Dantean City of Dis (chs. 9-10) and the concluding "Harrowing of Heaven" section of The Day After Judgment. The entry by the main human characters into the Devil's lair shows a post-Armageddon Dis—"The Nether Hell of diuturnal [sic] torture"—replaced by "a clean, well-lighted city like an illustration from some Utopian romance; it looked, in fact, like a cross between the city of the future in the old film Things táo Come and a fully automated machine shop" ([191]; ch. 12). Black Easter is dedicated to C. S. Lewis in C1 under Fiction; note in the Erlich and Dunn Clockwork Worlds anthology M. Abrash's "Dante's Hell as an Ideal Mechanical Environment." Cf. hell/technology images in Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring (2001) in his Lord of the Rings trilogy (listed in C2 under Graphics). (RDE, 09/09/06)