Inferno

Originally published in Galaxy from August 1975 - October 1975, Inferno was first published in book form by Pocket Books as a paperback in 1976. It was nominated for the Nebula Award, the Hugo Award, and the Ditmar Award that year, and placed 12th in the Locus Poll for Best SF Novel. There were UK editions in 1977 (hardcover and paperback), followed by the US hardcover edition in 1979 when Gregg Press reprinted the paperback in sturdy green library quality cloth binding. In August 2008 the Science Fiction Book Club published a hardcover edition of the revised edition, followed one month later by a trade paperback edition by Orb (Tor). In 2009 there was a sequel, Escape from Hell. "Inferno is quite literally a cakewalk through hell, with a science fiction writer as Dante and Benito Mussolini as Virgil. I kid you not. Pournelle and Niven have had the Chutzpah to rewrite Dante's Inferno as if they were some unholy hybrid of Roger Zelazny, Robert Heinlein, and Philip José Farmer. You are right there in the nether-reaches of the ultimate Sam Peckinpah movie with all the matter-of-fact solidity of a Hal Clement novel. It gets to you, it really does. This being lunacy of a transcendant order." -- Norman Spinrad "The somber beauty of Inferno brought up to the twentieth century with care and humor and some sins Dante didn't even suspect." -- Frank Herbert