I presented at a conference back in March about my idea of the "epistemic crisis" in science fiction. Specifically, I focused on stories where your understanding of how the world works is doubly upended, such as (though it's not actually sf) Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.
Afterwards, a member of the audience came up to me (I do not remember his name, alas) and suggested that I read a novella, Steven Peck's A Short Stay in Hell. He said it was an example of what I call an epistemic crisis happening not just once or twice, but repeatedly throughout the book. When I got home, I requested it from my local library.
I was quite surprised to realize that even though the book is over a decade old, it was in heavy demand. The library had just two physical copies, but I was fifteenth in line for them; the library had eight e-copies... but I was forty-fifth in line for them! This is the kind of demand typically reserved for brand-new books by popular authors. Why would this be happening to a book that came back in 2012?
The answer turns out to be that, I guess, it became "BookTok" and "BookTube" famous, receiving lots of positive interest there. Probably this is how my conference interlocutor came across it himself. Take a look at the book's popularity curve on LibraryThing:
Most books, of course, have an initial burst of interest when they are release and then go down over time. A Short Stay in Hell, on the other hand, began to take off in 2023 and has only continued to get more popular since! That I even got the book as quickly as I did (it took two months for my hold to come in) was because the library ordered three more copies.
A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck |
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Published: 2012 Read: June 2026 |
Anyway, what is the book actually about? It's a riff on Borges's "The Library of Babel," a story I have not actually read, about a library that contains every possible book, in the sense that the library is filled with books that contain every possible combination of random characters. So the vast majority of the books in the library are random nonsense, but through the vagaries of randomness, every book that exists in the real world is going to appear exactly once... along with books that are quite close to them but slightly different, and book that are mostly nonsense but contain a couple lucid sentences.
The narrator of A Short Stay is a devout Mormon who dies of cancer... and discovers that actually Zoroastianism is the one true religion. Whoops. Thus, he is (like most people) condemned to Hell. But Hell isn't an eternal punishment, you can redeem yourself and go to Heaven. For him and many others (it's indicated Hell can be different for different people), Hell is the library of Borges's story. The key to getting out is finding the book of your life story and inserting it into a slot.
I disagree with my conference interlocutor: I don't think this is an example of repeated epistemic crises. Once you have this basic premise explained to you, everything flows quite logically from it, and it is never upended. But that makes it, in fact, an example of a different but related phenomenon that interests me in sf: the fantasy story that starts from a logical impossibility but then thinks through all of its implications as logically as possible. If you could have a library like this, how big would it be? And, thus, what would the people trapped in it do? This is what Peck works out, through the vehicle of this story.
There's a pleasure to this, which China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation." It's the joy of a certain kind of fantasy. I reckon that Ann Leckie is a very good example of how to do this, in her stories from the world of Raven Tower, but also you see it in places like Ted Chiang's "Tower of Babylon," T. H. White's Mistress Masham's Repose, and even L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. It's just enjoyable to follow along with the author as they extrapolate from their basic premise... even if, as it is in A Short Stay, quite horrific!
This is a short book, and it's mostly given over to thinking through different aspects of what such a "Hell" might look like. What would the people in such an environment do, what kind of societies would spring up, what kind of implications would the sheer size of such a structure have? We get lots of cool stuff like the protagonist throwing himself off the structure and falling for an interminably long time—but then how would he stop himself?
The end of the book indicates he exists for billions of years in the library... but if you go back to the beginning, it's mentioned that the book you are reading is one he finds within the library, so if he inserts it into the slot, he'll finally get out and go to Heaven.
Except... we're told the book of your life story has to be free of typos, and I found at least two: on pp. 6 and 10, questions in dialogue are followed by capital letters when they should be lowercase ("One of the women whispered hoarsely" and "He said looking..."). So is he doomed to keep looking for the error-free version of his story for billions more years?
One last thing: the narrator is Mormon, like author Steven Peck. But so too are the two people who provide back cover blurbs: science fiction author Dan Wells and Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings. Is there a Mormon book-blurb-providing exchange?
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