Description:
"Tastefully insane and morbidly fun . . . delightfully realistic . . . Dante's Inferno as envisioned by Monty Python. A sidesplitting pleasure." --Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
The empire on which the sun never sets has turned its ambitions toward a land where it's never even risen: Victorian Britain is colonizing Hell itself.
The demons who once ran amok down there, torturing lost souls, were easy enough to subdue. The damned, left without tormentors, have been put to work on cotton and tobacco plantations. As for the colonists, it takes all sorts to stake a claim on the infernal frontier: there's MacTavish, the dissipated District Commissioner; the savvy spiritualist Penelope Hodgson-Huntley; the preacher's-son-turned-engineer Elijah Biddle; a cartful of orphaned girls sent down as part of an immigration scheme; and a zealous missionary offering salvation to the living and the dead alike.
Backed by the power of Britain at its globe-spanning peak, however, the great and good of the colony will not be content until they have plundered even the unconquered interior: Hell Undiminished. All that's needed is a pretext for taking up arms--and when a series of lurid murders sends the lonely farms and towns of British Hell into a panic, war seems inevitable. Will Her Majesty's colonial forces prove victorious, or will they be made, at last, to give the devil his due?
Set when the Old Empire of sails, slavery, and spices was transforming into the New Imperialism of steam and scientific racism, Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell is one-of-a-kind feat of the imagination. It is at once a raucous, biting satire of the ignorance and hubris that built our world; an epic quest into the darkest heart of darkness imaginable; and an epic as gripping as anything by Conrad, Forster, or Tolkien.
Brief description:
Robert G. Penner lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba. He is the author of the novels Strange Labour, one of Publishers Weekly's Best Science Fiction Books of 2020, and The Dark King Swallows the World. He has published numerous short stories in a wide range of speculative and literary journals under both his name and various pseudonyms.
Review Quotes:
"Tastefully insane and morbidly fun, this witty novel is a delightfully realistic imagining of the attempt to colonize the damned. For fans of long-dead English humorists, sideways séances, misapplied logic, and terribly bright young women subject to clueless chaperones, Notes on a Colonial Situation in Hell is Dante's Inferno as envisioned by Monty Python. A sidesplitting pleasure."
--Molly McGhee, author of Jonathan Abernathy You Are Kind
"Empire's gonna empire. Victorian Brits are pushing ever further into the underworld's heart of darkness but demonic Powers and Principalities are about to (and not about to) give them Hell. Kinda like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies--but smart, witty, imaginative, well-written and with something important to say about neo-colonialism."--Mark Bould, author of The Anthropocene Unconscious: Climate Catastrophe Culture
"The descent into hell is a delicious one . . . full of surprises and sharp turns and utter imagination. It is a masterpiece, intelligent and satirically brilliant."--David Bergen, author of Days of Feasting and Rejoicing
"Fueled by a conceit that could have been a classic Monty Python sketch, this deft, smooth novel refuses to stop at satire, moving beyond irony into a serious investigation of the implications that undergird its narrative superstructure."--Brendan C. Byrne, author of Accelerate and Another World Isn't Possible