Job, or Mockery of Justice

Christian political activist Alex Hergensheimer cruises the Pacific Islands. After visiting the Hawaiian Firefighting Festival, Alex suddenly discovers that he was in a different reality. Returning to the liner, he sees that everyone takes him for a completely different person - his "new" surname Graham, and, in addition, it turns out that his double had a mistress - the Danish Margreta Svendersdatter Gunderson, who worked as a maid on a cruise. After the shipwreck, Alex and Margreta fall into Mexico of yet another reality, from there, after experiencing an earthquake, they move to the United States to get to Kansas - Alex's homeland. Whenever the main characters accumulate a little money, the reality changes, and they remain with nothing (and once literally naked). In Texas, the main characters become guests of Satan , but do not yet suspect about it (this is the reality of Heinlein's “ History of the Future ”). In the finale of the novel, the world ends (in 1994 ), and Alex, as if he had not changed his faith, ends up in Paradise . There it turns out that Margreta was a Scandinavian pagan , and Loki arranged all their troubles with the permission of the Lord God . Alex discovers that he does not want to remain in Paradise without Margreta, although the heavenly office recognized him as a saint , and goes in search of her to Hell . Heaven and Hell are described satirically by Heinlein in the spirit of Captain Stormfield's Travels to Heaven by Mark Twain . Paradise is an unusually dull place in which the righteous themselves try to arrange a life reminiscent of the earth, and they hate the angels for complacency. Hell is a more suitable place for a person; the guide for him is the biblical harlot Raav ; Maria Magdalene , although she constantly lives in Paradise, sometimes visits the netherworld as a visiting specialist. As a result of a difficult transaction between the brothers God and Satan, and the order of a certain higher Supreme being (in Russian translation - “Mr. Koschey”), Margreta is removed from Valhalla and remains in hell with Alex (who believes that he got to Kansas and opened a small restaurant). The novel ends with the phrase: “Paradise is where Margreta is” ^[2] .

S.V. Gold, in the afterword to the 2018 edition, argued that by the time of his literary debut in 1939, Heinlein could work equally well in the genre of science fiction and fantasy ( Campbell at that time edited two magazines: “ Astounding Science Fiction ”- for science fiction, and“ Unknown ”- for fantasy). Nevertheless, in the literary market and among critics after the war, he was regarded as the leading author of the “solid” NF, although he periodically published voluminous texts in the fantasy genre: “The Unpleasant Profession of Jonathan Hog ” (1959) or “ The Road of Valor ” (1963). Heinlein received one of the first responses to his story Life Line from then-beginning student Isaac Asimov . Among other things, Asimov wrote to Heinlein about the art of PR, and, in particular, the following: “Jehovah got a good press in his support, so Satan would not hurt to hire a good press agent ...” After 45 years, Heinlein called Asimov the godfather of the novel “Job ". By the early 1980s, Heinlein came close to the idea of ​​the equivalence of physical and literary objects, as expressed in his novel The Number of the Beast . In the summer of 1982, Heinlein began writing a new religious novel, for which he carefully read the Bible . According to S. Gold, the choice of topics was a soberly calculated move: the publication was scheduled for 1984, which was predictably associated with Orwell’s dystopia , so a religious novel should stand out against political or futurological texts. During his acquaintance with Asimov, Heinlein loved J. Cabell ’s novel “ Jürgen, Comedy of Justice ”, which he had read while studying at the Navy Academy. In his novel, Heinlein used the subtitle “Comedy of Justice” and borrowed the image of Koschey, who was the Demiurge from Cabell. Heinlein already used the concept of the afterlife as a business enterprise in the 1940s in the story Magic, Inc. ", And the scenes of Paradise directly referred to the Captain Stormfield's Journey to Paradise by Mark Twain. At the same time, Heinlein did not want to limit himself to only an anticlerical satire, and his constant motives sounded in the novel, in particular, the correlation of ethical and aesthetic, first considered in Jonathan Hog. S. Gold argued that the literary game “Job” is Heinlein’s closest approach to postmodernism . Having started the manuscript in August 1982, Heinlein completed it in July 1983, taking a break from his trip to Antarctica. Heinlein redid the manuscript three times, but since in those years he already worked on a personal computer, no draft versions were preserved. After the publication of the novel, the novel reached 9th place in the New York Times bestseller list, was nominated for Hugo and Nebula , but received the award from Locus as the best fantasy novel ^[3] . S. Gold wrote:

I see in this nomination a certain triumph of justice: the writer, who did not recognize the barriers between science fiction and fiction, was finally evaluated on both sides of the border.

• "Job, or the Mockery of Justice" on the site " Science Fiction Laboratory "

• Glossary of Job's realities on the Heinlein Society website