Inferno

Rating:
Summary: Potlatch is not an example of "Violent Wasting"!
Review: This is an enjoyable book and you should read it, by all means.

But when you do, please mentally correct the authors' error in the examples they give of "Violent Wasters". The Violent Wasters are the denizens of Hell who made it their by willfully destroying their wealth to show off how wealthy they are. The authors incorrectly describe a potlatch as the gathering together and willful destruction of a large quantity of material goods, and hence a kind of "Violent Wasting".

This is not what a potlatch is. The potlatch is a Native American festival in which the hosts redistribute much, even most, of their worldly possessions to others. In the past they did this by literally giving away everything in the house. In today's cash economy, the tendency is for the family, clan or village to spend all its money on consumer goods which are then distributed at the potlatch. The custom is found in various forms all over the northern Pacific coast of North America among both Indian and Eskimo groups; in some places it has the name "potlatch" and in other places it has other names.

Christian missionaries were appalled by potlatches and pressured both the U.S. and Canadian federal governments to outlaw them. Why they were appalled I'm not sure. The purpose (or at any rate the effect) of the potlatch was to ensure that no family had too much of the wealth, and no family had too little. This is certainly in keeping with Christian doctrine, if not with Christian practice.

However, it seems the missionaries misunderstood. Perhaps it looked like Violent Waste to them, or maybe simply Communism. Since the European tendency is to think in terms of family welfare while the indigenous tendency is to think of the welfare of a whole people, the potlatch may have looked like waste to them. It may have been something written by a missionary which gave Mr. Niven and Mr. Pournelle the impression that potlatches involved waste.

Potlatches remained illegal until sometime in the 1950's, I think. They are back in vogue now. While teaching school in western Alaska I attended one. The village I was teaching in invited another village and, after several days of eating and dancing, all of the guests were lined up in order of age, from the elders on down to the babies, and given gifts ranging from furniture and blankets down to groceries and paper goods. Certainly nothing was destroyed, except for a door hinge on the meeting hall and that was an accidnent.

Rating:
Summary: Fun Adolescent Fantasy
Review: This was an enjoyable page-turner, very boy's own adventure (despite its unusual setting), some "if-I-try-I-can-do-it" heroics, no particularly impressive set-pieces (he's no Dante), but it was fun.

From other reviews I'd expected a bit more emphasis on a science-fiction rationalization from the protagonist, but they were rare and subordinate to the action. The ending was satisfying and unexpected.

It wasn't especially comic, despite the opportunities and occasional suspected effort, and it wasn't particularly moving. The characters were cardboard figures, the thrills were absent, the prose itself was utilitarian and unromantic--nonetheless I enjoyed it for what it was, though I won't be reading it again.

Note: a 3 star ranking from me is actually pretty good; I reserve 4 stars for tremendously good works, and 5 only for the rare few that are or ought to be classic; unfortunately most books published are 2 or less.

Rating:
Summary: An updated Classic
Review: This was the first book by Niven I read. It started me on a five year science fiction reading jag. I liked his modernization of the original upon which it was based. Often original Classics are tedious and unintersting. I believe as times change so should literature. However beautiful, profound or whatever the original Classic might have been, in "now time" it's a drag. This is especially more so with literature that has to be translated not only from one time period to another, but also from one language to another.
Inferno could've been rendered in many different ways interestingly. The Niven/Pournelle version was excellent. Stories like this should be made into movies.
Back in the '50s there were comic books called Classics. These took famous items of literature and rendered them into a very condensed, graphic versions of the original. They were a good familiarization and intoduction to such literature. This version of Inferno, although it takes greater liberty with the original, does much the same thing as those Classic comics only in an adult version.