Recently I had to reread ” #Hell Is the Absence of #God “, #TedChiang . Because it’s good. And I became fascinated with the #worldbuilding . So, let me tell you the rules of this world. At least as they appear to the people in the story. Beware spoilers.

• God exists. (1)
  • As with the rest of these items, faith isn’t involved in the system, everybody knows how it works.
  • God isn’t involved in everything. (1)
• Heaven (up) exists. (5)
  • Heaven is good. (8)
• Hell (down) exists. (7)
  • Hell is exile from God. (7)
• There is an afterlife.
  • Those who love God perfectly go up, including successful light-seekers (see below). (5, 9, 23, 24)
  • Suicides go down. (14)
  • Failed light-seekers (dying in the attempt) go down. (26)
  • Humanists go down. (16)
  • The dead in Heaven can visit Earth. (11,18) They don’t talk, but they seem happy. (11) They don’t have bodies. (25)
  • The dead in Hell can be observed by the living, but not the other way around. (7) They seem mentally content and physically fine. (7, 15)
• Angels exist. (3)
  • From time to time, angels visit Earth. (1) The timing is random. (10, 26) Some sites (all inhospitable) are visited often. (13, 22, 27)
  • A visit from an angel has a lot of impact: miracles including cures (3, 10), and consequences of the violent entrance and exit (4), including instant knowledge of the existence of God (becoming eyeless) (3, 19, 23), and injury and death (6). All impact is random. (3, 12, 20, 21)
  • Some angels have fallen, their impact seem less violent, and it’s possible to talk to them. (17)
• Light-seekers seek out angels to become eyeless. (24)

So, those are the rules. On top of that, people try to interpret the visitations etc. They don’t appear to have much success with that (because of the randomness), so that’s a separate part of the world building, and I won’t look at it here.

I bolded 2 parts of the rules above, because the story illustrates, that 2 rules can be in conflict. (28) Leading to Hell feeling unbearable for a few. (29)

For completeness, here are the quotes in the order they appear in the text.

1. Neil was born with a congenital abnormality that caused his left thigh to be externally rotated and several inches shorter than his right; the medical term for it was proximal femoral focus deficiency. Most people he met assumed God was responsible for this, but Neil’s mother hadn’t witnessed any visitations while carrying him; his condition was the result of improper limb development during the sixth week of gestation, nothing more. In fact, as far as Neil’s mother was concerned, blame rested with his absent father, whose income might have made corrective surgery a possibility, although she never expressed this sentiment aloud.
2. He became an adult who — like so many others — viewed God’s actions in the abstract until they impinged upon his own life. Angelic visitations were events that befell other people, reaching him only via reports on the nightly news.
3. It was an unexceptional visitation, smaller in magnitude than most but no different in kind, bringing blessings to some and disaster to others. In this instance the angel was Nathanael, making an appearance in a downtown shopping district. Four miracle cures were effected: the elimination of carcinomas in two individuals, the regeneration of the spinal cord in a paraplegic, and the restoration of sight to a recently blinded person. There were also two miracles that were not cures: a delivery van, whose driver had fainted at the sight of the angel, was halted before it could overrun a busy sidewalk; another man was caught in a shaft of Heaven’s light when the angel departed, erasing his eyes but ensuring his devotion.
4. […] the angel’s billowing curtain of flame […]
5. […] her soul’s ascension toward Heaven.
6. Nathanael hadn’t delivered any specific message; the angel’s parting words, which had boomed out across the entire visitation site, were the typical Behold the power of the Lord. Of the eight casualties that day, three souls were accepted into Heaven and five were not, a closer ratio than the average for deaths by all causes.
7. Like every other nondevout person, Neil had never expended much energy on where his soul would end up; he’d always assumed his destination was Hell, and he accepted that. That was the way of things, and Hell, after all, was not physically worse than the mortal plane. It meant permanent exile from God, no more and no less; the truth of this was plain for anyone to see on those occasions when Hell manifested itself. These happened on a regular basis; the ground seemed to become transparent, and you could see Hell as if you were looking through a hole in the floor. The lost souls looked no different than the living, their eternal bodies resembling mortal ones. You couldn’t communicate with them — their exile from God meant that they couldn’t apprehend the mortal plane where His actions were still felt — but as long as the manifestation lasted you could hear them talk, laugh, or cry, just as they had when they were alive.
8. Of course, everyone knew that Heaven was incomparably superior […]
9. Now that Sarah was in Heaven, his situation had changed. Neil wanted more than anything to be reunited with her, and the only way to get to Heaven was to love God with all his heart.
10. When Janice’s mother was eight months pregnant with her, she lost control of the car she was driving and collided with a telephone pole during a sudden hailstorm, fists of ice dropping out of a clear blue sky and littering the road like a spill of giant ball bearings. She was sitting in her car, shaken but unhurt, when she saw a knot of silver flames — later identified as the angel Bardiel — float across the sky. The sight petrified her, but not so much that she didn’t notice the peculiar settling sensation in her womb. A subsequent ultrasound revealed that the unborn Janice Reilly no longer had legs; flipperlike feet grew directly from her hip sockets.
11. Janice’s parents were sitting at their kitchen table, crying and asking what they had done to deserve this, when they received a vision: the saved souls of four deceased relatives appeared before them, suffusing the kitchen with a golden glow. The saved never spoke, but their beatific smiles induced a feeling of serenity in whoever saw them.
12. There Janice met two individuals with cancer who’d witnessed Rashiel’s visitation, thought their cure was at hand, and been bitterly disappointed when they realized they’d been passed over.
13. […] the holy sites, those places where — for reasons unknown — angelic visitations occurred on a regular basis […]
14. If suicide would have ended his pain, he’d have done it without hesitation, but that would only ensure that his separation from Sarah was permanent.
15. […] she’d seen her husband among the lost souls. […] she had committed suicide to rejoin her husband. None of them knew the status of Robin’s and her husband’s relationship in the afterlife, but successes were known to happen; some couples had indeed been happily reunited through suicide.
16. […] the humanist movement; its members considered it wrong to love a God who inflicted such pain, and advocated that people act according to their own moral sense instead of being guided by the carrot and the stick. These were people who, when they died, descended to Hell in proud defiance of God.
17. Visitations of fallen angels were infrequent, and caused neither good fortune nor bad; they weren’t acting under God’s direction, but just passing through the mortal plane as they went about their unimaginable business. On the occasions they appeared, people would ask them questions: Did they know God’s intentions? Why had they rebelled? The fallen angels’ reply was always the same: Decide for yourselves. That is what we did. We advise you to do the same.
18. […] visions don’t appear just because a person needs one […]
19. […] few visitations resulted in an eyeless person, since Heaven’s light entered the mortal plane only in the brief moments that an angel emerged from or reentered Heaven […] The light that had brought his soul as close to perfection as was possible in the mortal plane had also deformed his body […] Benny described Heaven’s light as infinitely beautiful, a sight of such compelling majesty that it vanquished all doubts. It constituted incontrovertible proof that God should be loved, an explanation that made it as obvious as 1+1=2. [More about Benny below, at 23.]
20. Neither of them had ever heard of a previous instance where God had left His mark on a person in one visitation and removed it in another.
21. There were a few instances of individuals receiving multiple miracle cures over their lifetimes, but their illnesses or disabilities had always been of natural origin, not given to them in a visitation.
22. Whereas in most of the world one could wait an entire lifetime and never experience a visitation, at a holy site one might only wait months, sometimes weeks. Pilgrims knew that the odds of being cured were still poor; of those who stayed long enough to witness a visitation, the majority did not receive a cure.
23. […] the absoluteness of Benny’s devotion. No matter what misfortune befell him in the future, Benny’s love of God would never waver, and he would ascend to Heaven when he died.
24. Every holy site had its pilgrims who, rather than looking for a ­miracle cure, deliberately sought out Heaven’s light. Those who saw it were always accepted into Heaven when they died, no matter how selfish their motives had been […]
25. [Becoming eyeless:] At an instinctual level, Neil was averse to the idea: it sounded like undergoing brainwashing as a cure for depression. He couldn’t help but think that it would change his personality so drastically that he’d cease to be himself. Then he remembered that everyone in Heaven had undergone a similar transformation; the saved were just like the eyeless except that they no longer had bodies.
26. […] seeking Heaven’s light was far more difficult than an ordinary pilgrimage, and far more dangerous. Heaven’s light leaked through only when an angel entered or left the mortal plane, and since there was no way to predict where an angel would first appear, light-seekers had to converge on the angel after its arrival and follow it until its departure. To maximize their chances of being in the narrow shaft of Heaven’s light, they followed the angel as closely as possible during its visitation; depending on the angel involved, this might mean staying alongside the funnel of a tornado, the wavefront of a flash flood, or the expanding tip of a chasm as it split apart the landscape. Far more light-seekers died in the attempt than succeeded. Statistics about the souls of failed light-seekers were difficult to compile, since there were few witnesses to such expeditions, but the numbers so far were not encouraging. In sharp contrast to ordinary pilgrims who died without receiving their sought-after cure, of which roughly half were admitted into Heaven, every single failed light-seeker had descended to Hell.
27. Holy sites were invariably in inhospitable places: one was an atoll in the middle of the ocean, while another was in the mountains at an elevation of twenty thousand feet.
28. Neil began, slowly but surely, bleeding to death. […] another beam of Heaven’s light penetrated the cloud cover and struck Neil […] the light revealed to Neil all the reasons he should love God. […] So minutes later, when Neil finally bled to death, he was truly worthy of salvation. And God sent him to Hell anyway. [Ethan] saw Neil’s soul leave his body and rise toward Heaven, only to descend into Hell.
29. Everything Neil sees, hears, or touches causes him distress, and unlike in the mortal plane this pain is not a form of God’s love, but a consequence of His absence.