(contains spoilers, duh)

This week, I turned to something of a very morbid topic: hell, and how it comes up in science fiction. As I think I have said before, I am a huge fan of horror. Science fiction has the ability to imagine any sort of fate, including ones following (or worse than) death, located in a place best described as hell.

This was a topic I could find very little information about online, as someone has yet to trace a comprehensive study of “Hell” in Science Fiction. However, I think it’s a fascinating theme, and one that comes up in three of my most favorite pieces of science fiction ever. Though there are probably a lot of different pieces of science fiction that explore these ideas, I want to evaluate these images of hell below:

“I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” by Harlan Ellison (1967)

Not gonna lie, this story fucked me up when I read it in high school. The gist of it is, humanity created a supercomputer some time in the future, called “AM” in the story (initials standing for a bunch of different meanings). AM developed sentience and killed all of humanity, except for five people. AM, furious about its own existence and the prospect of its immortality, tortures these five via superficial playing with their emotions. AM controls all aspects of these humans’ worlds: their bodies, their environment, their future (it somehow keeps them immortal and incapable of killing themselves).

At the conclusion of the story, after undergoing epic odyssey to find canned food in what turns out to be a ploy of AM’s torture. Ted, the narrator and protagonist, realizes that he must murder his four partners in misery in order to cease their suffering. He stabs them with icicles, but now bears the torment and hatred of AM on his own. AM turns him into an amorphous blob, and the story ends with the being that was once Ted contemplating his miserable future, no different than the present.

I believe there are two hells here. The original hell containing the five remaining humans was horrible, about as awful as it can get. However, the brilliance of Ellison’s story is not the progression created by the five characters’ odyssey; the progression is the evolution of unthinkable torture to something even worse, pain beyond imagining.

This is a unique hell because it is fundamentally created and thus related to human hubris. Humanity created a devil, whose evil and omnipotence led to humanity’s demise. This devil created its own hell with the express purpose of torturing humans. It is so outrageously foreign, so evil, that there is no reasoning with it: in the fact that it is not a human, it has absolutely no capacity for empathy. The terror here is that humanity has never encountered everything so evil, and it has unthinkable power over every component of Ted’s existence.

Event Horizon, dir. Paul W. S. Anderson (1997)

Honestly, this movie gets so much shit, and I don’t know why. It was panned by critics when it first came out, but it’s absolutely amazing. Understandably, it’s gained a cult following since its release.

In Event Horizon, a new ship was given a motor that can make portals open in order to travel vast distances across space. When it tried to actually do this, it disappeared, reappearing only a years later. A crew, led by Sam O’Neil and Laurence Fishburne, visit the ship only to find that the portal it had opened was actually one to hell; the ship itself is now possessed by manifested evil.

In short, this movie is just an absolute trip. It brilliantly unites fears both held in science and religion about what is beyond the unknown, creating a sick new image of Hell that I haven’t seen on screen before. By making the ship itself not just a dynamic setting but also a character in and of itself, the film creates an atmosphere more claustrophobic than Alien and just as horrifying as “I Have No Mouth”.

“White Christmas“, “USS Callister”, “Black Museum”, and “San Junipero”, Black Mirror (2011 – 2019)

Black Mirror is insanely innovative on a number of fronts, and is some of the best science fiction on screen today. It’s Christmas special, introduced in 2014 as “White Christmas”, brought things to the next level. The technological novum introduced in this episode is the “cookie,” which allows consciousness to be transported into a digital world. In “White Christmas”, Jon Hamm’s character explains that he worked for a company that copied people’s consciousnesses to serve as virtual assistants who would know their masters tastes and interests. These consciousnesses, fully autonomous as individuals, are effectively enslaved by their masters; in one scene, when Hamm’s character is training one of these assistants, he punishes her refusal to work by speeding up time, leaving her for several months in this purgatorial space with nothing to do. The episode concludes with the protagonist, who has confessed to the murder of a child, being punished by having his cookie sped up, making his consciousness exist in this hellscape for thousands and thousands of years.

The “cookie as an entrance to hell” theme resurfaced primarily in two later episodes of the show. In “USS Callister,” a cast-aside computer programmer copies the consciousnesses of his coworkers and transports them to a Star Trek-like world where they are tortured at random, forced to do his bidding, and beg for death. This programmer, played by Jesse Plemmons, gets his lot; his game crashes and his consciousness is presumably left stranded in his virtual spaceship forever. This similar type of hell is also summoned in “Black Museum”, in which the consciousness of an innocent man on death row is put into a museum, where his consciousness can be tortured with a virtual electric chair for eternity. Visitors can also copy a full rendering of this consciousness onto keychains, where this man can be tortured by the electric chair forever.

The horror of these episodes is clear, but their salient themes are important to note. Black Mirror is keen to show the injustice and exploitation of the “condemned” innocent. They also show that technology can give people extreme power on Earth, but also the power to rule souls; they have full autonomy to take innocent souls and torment them for pleasure in fictional hellscapes. Through this hubris, the evilness of their humanity is also revealed.

From these examples, it is clear that Black Mirror strikes a balance between the Hells presented in “I Have No Mouth” and Event Horizon. Like Ellison’s short story, Hell in these episodes is an instrument of torment by a malicious entity. This comparison to Ellison is best shown in “Black Museum”, where hell is manifested small token of musing, a souvenir and a knick knack, from which small enjoyment is derived. However, these episodes also bear similarity to Event Horizon in that technology serves as the direct entrance to hell, and is thus fundamentally intertwined with it. In Event Horizon, the spaceship itself both summons hell and becomes hell itself; in Black Mirror, technology takes on this dual role as well.

Conversely, Black Mirror also presents a beautiful vision of heaven in “San Junipero”. In this story, older people transplant their consciousnesses (via the same cookie) into a digital world of a utopian California town, where they can live forever. It’s interesting that Black Mirror is ambitious enough to tackle post-life issues on both sides of the spectrum. Perhaps the comparison necessarily drawn between the heavenly “San Junipero” and its hellish counterparts shows the fundamentally ambivalent nature of technology. More simply, it may just serve to provide a vision of a perfect afterlife–a heaven–to show how horrible this hell truly is.

Conclusion

As I’ve shown, the idea of Hell is a recurring motif that has come up in science fiction a number of times and explored in different ways. Hell, used loosely, can be seen as a combination of three distinct components 1) pain, 2) a cruel overlord and 3) eternity. It’s interesting to see how people in science fiction worlds end up in Hell, whether it be through a man-made creation. Usually, these tend to involve hubris and cruelty, but whether or not those who enter hell deserve it is a huge question. In further pursuing this study, it would be interesting to look at whether portrayals of Hell in science fiction are related to or portray concerns about morality eternity — I’d be willing to posit that it does.

Other cool science fiction dealing with Hell that I didn’t have time to get to:

Inferno, in Divine Comedy by Dante (14th century)

“It’s a Good Life” from The Twilight Zone (1961)

Doom series by id Software (1999 – today)

Hell is the Absence of God by Ted Chiang (2001)

The Cabin in the Woods, dir. by Joss Whedon (2011)

The Good Place (2016 – 2020)

Fall; or, Dodge in Hell by Neal Stephenson (2019)

Portal by Valve (2007)

“Beyond the Aquila Rift” from Love, Death and Robots (2019)

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