Like Hell

Hell is a big part of the collective imagination. This description of a SPECTRE meeting:

"The dim red light only just illuminated the faces of the twenty men sitting round the long table, and the red-and-black-shadowed features, contorting with the slight sway of the top light, gave the scene the appearance of a conspiracy in hell."

-Ian Fleming, Thunderball (London, 1961), 21, p. 166.

- reminds us of "some ancient hell" in Poul Anderson's "The Star Plunderer."

 

Somewhere in Anderson's The Man who Counts or on this blog or both, battling bat-winged Diomedeans are compared with demons and there is another such comparison here.

Anderson's Ardazirho see the Gate of the Dead not as a red-lit subterranean realm but as a dark cave in the sky. It is helpful to contrast our myths with alternative options.