2016 fantasy novella. The greatest philosopher of all time is offering
to sell his soul to the Devil. All he wants is twenty more years to
complete his life’s work. But the demon assigned to the task is deeply
suspicious. For one thing, it seems like an obviously bad deal for the
human. For another, the philosopher asked for him by name.
There have been quite a lot of stories about people trying to
make bargains with Hell, and then trying to get out of them. I think
the first one I read was Larry Niven's Convergent Series. This does
it at greater length than most, and because it's a Parker story, you
know that there are going to be tricks within tricks. (I'd love to see
Parker tackle a caper story. Even a fantasy one, if it were absolutely
necessary.)
Like a caper story, you know going in that there's deception involved;
the real question is how the philosopher is planning to come out on
top. Is he really smart enough to out-think Hell?
A slight mis-step, to my mind, is that the viewpoint shifts between
demon and philosopher (and at least in the electronic copy I read this
wasn't well-signalled). I'd have preferred to leave the latter as a
black box, having only the information that the demon has to work
with, rather than the additional material from his own thoughts… which
doesn't even spoil the mystery, it's just a style thing.
But this is a ferocious puzzle challenge between two high-level
intellects who are also interesting people, written in such a way that
mere normal humans have a fair chance at working out what's going on,
and I recommend it highly.
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