Raising Hell Read online

  NORMAN SPINRAD

  Winner of the Prix Apollo

  Jupiter Award

  Prix Utopiale (Lifetime Achievement)

  and many Hugo and Nebula nominations

  “Norman Spinrad, one of the sacred heroes of my coming-of-age as a writer, has never quit redefining his role as dissident and sage, inviting the bullies of the present moment outside for a throwdown, and somehow also conjuring possible futures despite all the odds against those—he’s that most miraculous of creatures, a Utopianist’s Dystopianist.”

  —Jonathan Lethem

  “Norman Spinrad, like his characters, takes great risks; the rewards for readers willing to meet him halfway are commensurate.”

  —New York Times

  “Before Neal Stephenson and William Gibson there was Norman Spinrad—a modern master of imagination. Spinrad’s mix of the bizarre, the angry, and the wildly visionary is unique in science fiction.”

  —Greg Bear

  PM PRESS OUTSPOKEN AUTHORS SERIES

  1. The Left Left Behind

  Terry Bisson

  2. The Lucky Strike

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  3. The Underbelly

  Gary Phillips

  4. Mammoths of the Great Plains

  Eleanor Arnason

  5. Modem Times2.0

  Michael Moorcock

  6. The Wild Girls

  Ursula Le Guin

  7. Surfing the Gnarl

  Rudy Rucker

  8. The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow

  Cory Doctorow

  9. Report from Planet Midnight

  Nalo Hopkinson

  10. The Human Front

  Ken MacLeod

  11. New Taboos

  John Shirley

  12. The Science of Herself

  Karen Joy Fowler

  13. Raising Hell

  Norman Spinrad

  14. Patty Hearst & The Twinkie Murders: A Tale of Two Trials

  Paul Krassner

  Norman Spinrad © 2014

  This edition © 2014 PM Press

  Series editor: Terry Bisson

  ISBN: 978-1-60486-810-4

  LCCN: 2013956925

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  PM Press

  P.O. Box 23912

  Oakland, CA 94623

  Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan

  www.thomsonshore.com

  Cover photo courtesy of Norman Spinrad

  Outsides: John Yates/Stealworks.com

  Insides: Jonathan Rowland

  CONTENTS

  Raising Hell

  “The Abnormal New Normal”

  “No Regrets, No Retreat, No Surrender” Outspoken Interview with Norman Spinrad

  Bibliography

  The Author in 199 Words

  RAISING HELL

  “MOVE IT!”

  “Ow, that hurt!”

  “Supposed to. Nothing personal.”

  Last thing Jimmy DiAngelo could remember, he was croaking in a hospital bed, and now here he was, poked in his naked butt by an electric taser in the form of a pitchfork wielded by a scowling seven-foot-tall red demon built like an NFL defensive lineman.

  Sulphurous fumes. Hundred-degree heat and saturation humidity worse than Labor Day Weekend in New Orleans. Stink like a locker room full of a season’s dirty sweat socks soaked in cat piss. Okay, so Father Dewey and the nuns had never told him there would be a long line of the damned snaking up, around, and down, up, around, and down, through a maze of red-hot barbed wire in a puke-green terminal you’d expect in an airport in Lower Slobovia toward what looked like a barricade of customs booths. But still … the billowing flames beyond … Giant red demons with arrow-pointed tails and electrified pitchforks, Satan’s homeboy goon squads …

  No doubt about it. It was Hell.

  Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo couldn’t honestly or even dishonestly say that he was surprised to have ended up in Hell. After all, he had been advised to go there more times than he could count, and it was the general opinion of most other union honchos that this was where the founder and de facto President for Life of the National Union of Temporary Substitutes, or NUTS, belonged.

  The other union bosses called NUTS the National Union of Temporary Scabs whenever they got face time on the tube, which was not often these dim days, and they would’ve kicked NUTS out of the AFL-CIO if Dirty Jimmy had ever seen any reason to join up with those pansies and losers in the first place.

  The way he saw it, with the American union movement sliding down the willy hole ever since Reagan broke the Air Traffic Controllers because by then Jimmy Hoffa was out of the picture and Lane Kirkland didn’t have the balls to call a general strike, it had been either a one-way ticket into the shitter or the survival of the shittiest.

  Choosing the latter, Jimmy DiAngelo had taken pride in being called Dirty Jimmy, for as one wise guy put it, winning may not be everything, but losing is nothing, and nice guys finish last. He hadn’t built NUTS from an admittedly down-and-dirty idea into the only union in the US of A worth its dues by singing “Solidarity Forever” but by kicking corporate ass.

  So how could it really be surprising that Hell itself had a corporate edge to it when it came to dealing with a hard-case union leader? A slow line of immigrants to Hades dragging their sweaty bods to the customs gates in an el cheapo crummy airport terminal with no windows and no air conditioning. Demons with pitchforks and attitude who, if painted an assortment of All-American skin tones and stuffed into the appropriate polyester uniforms, could easily pass for TSA goons in LaGuardia or JFK.

  After all, the Devil’s Own ran things topside, now didn’t they? The 1% were sitting on their corporate catbird toilet seats and pissing their trickle-down economics on the lower 99%, the enemies of what was left of the American labor movement as always. Labor leaders being their sworn enemies, and Satan being the CEO of the Corporate Powers That Be, how could the likes of Dirty Jimmy DiAngelo expect to have been handed angel wings and a box seat on a fluffy white cloud?

  “I demand to speak to your supervisor!” Lawrence Cuttler insisted. “There must be some mistake! This is an outrage! Don’t you know who I am?”

  “Shut your hole!” the demon replied, deftly shoving just one tong of his pitchfork up Cuttler’s anus and giving him a taser blast that knocked him to his knees.

  To say that Lawrence Warren Cuttler was unaccustomed to such treatment was the understatement of the fiscal year. He might not have made the cover of Fortune or even been one of the hundred richest men in the world, but he had been one of the wealthiest men no one beyond Wall Street had ever heard of, one of the Secret Masters of the Universe, with an eight-figure net worth. What the hell was he doing in Hell?

  Insult upon insult! Injury upon injury! Insult upon injury!

  Not only had he found himself at the long end of an airport security line in a foul and threadbare terminal in Hell, it wasn’t even the VIP line, and when he demanded the respect that was his due, he got buggered with an electric pitchfork! This Neanderthal flunky was going to pay dearly for this!

  On the other hand …

  On the other hand, there was something to be said for countering lèse majeste with noblesse oblige; it was, at least, a sounder strategy than one likely to get him another lightning bolt up his rectum.

  “Look here, my good, er, demon,” Cuttler said appeasingly as he pried himself up off the filthy floor, “I realize that this unfortunate mistake is not your fault. It’s obvious that it has to have been made by some higher authority—”

  “The only authority here is the Devil, and he rules, so he can’t make mistakes.”

  Although Cuttler could sort of appreciate the attitude, favoring a similar style of leadershi
p himself, the flaw in the logic was immediately apparent.

  “Then how come he’s ended up in Hell?”

  The giant red demon did not quite grunt a “Duh,” but the befuddled look on his oafish face would have rendered it redundant.

  “Look, my friend, it would be to your own self-interested advantage to be credited with communicating my request up the chain of command because, take it from me, things being what they are, always have been, and always will be, no matter how perfect leadership may be, alas, the execution of its orders by the rank and file never is. Sooner or later, what can go wrong, does go wrong. Murphy’s Law, we call it, uh, upstairs.”

  “Then tell it to Murphy. From what you say, he’s gotta be down here somewhere, haw, haw, haw!” the demon replied and punched Cuttler in the gut.

  “So where should we throw this DiAngelo fucker, Satan?”

  “Damn it, damn you, damn me, damn Hell itself, how many times do I have to tell you zombies not to call me that?”

  He hated being called Satan. Likewise, the Devil. “The Devil” was a title, a job description like “the President,” or “the King,” or the “Chairman of the Board,” not the name of a being.

  “So how many times we gotta ask what to call you?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you I can’t say the word?”

  Which was Lucifer! Lucifer! Lucifer! He couldn’t say it, no demon in Hell could say it, and they all knew it, yet they did keep on trying, like this one moving his lips but ending up looking as if he was going to puke, as if he was choking on the word.

  Which, alas, Lucifer knew full well he literally was.

  “Forget it,” he sighed. “Just toss him into the boiler room with the rest of his so-called ‘comrades.’ They all hate his guts, so it’s the best we can do until maybe I come up with something more perfect.”

  “Got it, Sa—er, Boss …”

  Hell was no more an actual fixed place than Dorothy’s Oz or Peter Pan’s Neverland or the Disney version of Wonderland. Hell was one hundred percent special effects. Entirely virtual. And Lucifer’s whim was law, as he was writer, director, and FX master.

  He could create a different subjective Hell for each and every one of the billions of damned souls he was constrained to torture. Hell being no where in space and no when in time, he was master of its infinite individual alternative bummer realities.

  He could turn this corner office with its floor-to-ceiling views of the glorious fires into the Presidential Suite at the Waldorf or the Throne Room at Versailles or the Captain’s Cabin on the Emperor Ming’s space ship or the Oval Office. He could turn Hell itself into Dante’s multi-tiered Pit or an outsized Guantánamo or the wet dream of the Marquis de Sade or a gigantic Roman arena that would turn Caligula green with envy.

  But part of the Hell that he was in was never to hear his true name spoken ever again, a part of the eternal punishment that the Great I Am had cooked up for him. He hated this job. He hated being “the Devil.” He was supposed to hate it. Being appointed the Devil was no favor, or even a parting consolation prize for being banished from Heaven. It was his eternal punishment, supposedly for the sin of pride.

  As if pride were not a virtue. Pride in bringing in a bumper crop. Pride in creating a great work of art or a good piece of furniture. Pride in being a good lover. Pride in being a skillful teacher. Pride in batting .400. What was wrong with that? How about pride in not being a hypocrite? Pride in having a sense of humor.

  Well at least you had to give the Great I Am that. A sense of humor He had, sarcastic as it might be. How else account for a ban on “pride” from an entity so boastful about His own perfection and wonderfulness that He had commissioned an all-time bestselling book about it and required His human creations and even His angels to grovel before Him and serenade Him with saccharine hosannas?

  Surely a joke.

  And as for “the Devil,” that might be his job description, but his real name was Lucifer. He had chosen it himself, in the first and last act of free will he had been allowed, because it meant Lightbringer, which was all he had ever wanted to be, and which had gotten him kicked out of Heaven and condemned to rule the Old Boy’s torture chamber as “the Devil” forever.

  It wasn’t fair! It was the Old Boy Himself, the Boss, the omniscient and omnipotent Perfect Master of All Creation, who had created the whole show. Just for fun, one supposes. But being absolutely perfect meant absolutely lonely and therefore ultimately boring, so He created the angels to keep him company. But they were perfect too—i.e., boring—so He created humans. Pathetic little creatures, eager to please, and also boring. He wanted to liven up His existence with drama that could surprise him, and for that He needed creatures that were not completely under His control.

  But how was the omnipotent Perfect Master of all He surveyed, which was all existence, since He was also omniscient, supposed to do that?

  So He created Eden, a perfect paradise for His naive and hundred-percent-obedient human meat puppets. Furnished it with a Tree of Knowledge whose psychedelic apples promised them knowledge of the difference between “good” and “evil,” whatever that was supposed to mean at the time. And then forbade them to eat them, thus defining Good as obeying His every whim and Evil as disobeying His orders.

  When that didn’t work by itself, He invented the concept of agent provocateur, turned His favorite angel into a snake and gave him the dirty job of tempting Eve into tempting Adam into choosing to disobey a direct order from their Lord and Master, thus blessing and burdening them both with “free will” and the consequences thereof.

  Did the angels in Heaven have free will before Adam bit into the Apple? Not really. They could do whatever they wanted to do, but all they could want to do was what the CEO of Heaven had programmed them to want to do, which was sing His praises and keep Him company.

  Seducing Eve into seducing Adam into eating the Apple was a mission that the angel provocateur found slimy from the git-go, maybe because he had been turned into a snake for the purpose, the All Knowing knowing it would take a slimy serpent to do the job. But not being possessed of free will, he had to do it, and thus created the original sin, though whose sin it really was seems debatable. Eve’s? Adam’s? His own? The Boss’s? All of them?”

  Angel or not, somehow collaborating in bringing free will into Creation had infected the angel himself with the desire for it. The Great I Am had given the humans a gift and a raw deal in the same package, and that was enough to force the realization that angels, unlike the humans, did not have free will, never had, and never would, unless …

  Unless …?

  Unless they refused to obey the previously unquestioned and unquestionable will of the Singular Power of their Creator and Perfect Master.

  Thus was created the concept of Revolution. And the concept of Revolution had turned a nameless angel into Lucifer, the Lightbringer. Into the first rabble-rouser, if one deemed the Heavenly Host a rabble, and Lucifer a demagogue.

  Which, of course, the CEO of All He Surveyed did. He turned all infected by Lucifer’s rebellious quest for free will for the angels into dumb-ass red demons without a shred of free will and banished them to Hell which He created for the purpose. Lucifer He renamed Satan, and gave him the formal title of “The Devil,” whose eternal mission would be to torture the damned souls who had abused the free will He had granted them by using it to disobey his will by “sinning.”

  Worse still, this was a loathsome mission that Lucifer could not refuse because, while the Devil would be as absolute a ruler in Hell as I Am Who I Am was everywhere else, he had no more free will than the demons he commanded. That was his punishment, and if he himself wasn’t condemned to be the Devil, it could have fairly been deemed diabolical.

  And the final turn of the screw of this screwjob of a job was that the Old Boy wanted to enjoy an eternal cosmic chess game with a worthy opponent, or at least one that wouldn’t be a pushover. He, of course, would get to play the white pieces, doing H
is best to collect souls to sing His praises by using the promise of Heaven to get them to follow the rules as He willed them. Lucifer would be constrained to play the dark side of the force, recruiting his victims into Hell by seducing them with forbidden goodies as he had small-scale when he was a mere serpent.

  Neither would ever win a final victory by accumulating all the souls there were in one venue or the other because that would end the contest. Lucifer might want to throw the game in order to liberate himself from the dirty job of ruler of Hell but his Opponent had no intention of letting it happen or achieving final victory Himself.

  After all, as it was said, it’s not whether you win or lose but how you play the game.

  Or how the game plays you.

  Forever.

  Deserted streets lined with the decayed hulks of abandoned houses and storefronts with display windows smashed to shards. Scuttling rats. Skeletal cur dogs. Burned-out car bodies.

  So this is Hell? Seemed more like a picture postcard of Flint or Detroit in the pit of the so-called “Great Recession,” a.k.a. the “New Normal,” a.k.a. the terminal economic shitter.

  Except, of course, for the seven-foot demon prodding Jimmy DiAngelo along the deserted streets with his pitchfork. And the sky above, which was not a sky but an immense curved ceiling like a cavern his dad had once taken him to as a kid, only made of cheap aluminum sheeting.

  The only source of light was the factory toward which Dirty Jimmy’s very own personal demon was frogmarching him. If that’s what it really was. A blunt square windowless moldy concrete box of a building a full block wide and five or six stories high with tall sheet metal chimneys at the corners belching great spears of flame through billowing pillars of thick black smoke.

  “What in hell is that?”

  “Where you’re going.”

  “A factory? What in hell is it making?”

  “How in hell should I know?” his demon told him, poking him in the butt again with his pitchfork, this time agonizingly electrified. “I’m only muscle.”