{"id":1589,"date":"2021-10-07T16:48:31","date_gmt":"2021-10-07T16:48:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1589"},"modified":"2021-10-13T18:16:06","modified_gmt":"2021-10-13T18:16:06","slug":"the-hades-business-by-terry-pratchett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1589","title":{"rendered":"The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Hades Business<\/em><\/strong> by Terry Pratchett (Science Fantasy<\/em> #60, August 1963) opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through the air. He ends up unconscious in the fireplace and then, when he comes around, finds the Devil leaning over him.
During their subsequent conversation the Devil tells Crucible that no-one has arrived in the Other Place for almost two thousand years, and that he wants to hire Crucible to head up an advertising campaign. After the Devil leaves, Crucible thinks about the offer and concludes he wants the money\u2014but doesn\u2019t want Lucifer running around. So he visits his local church.
The next part of the story involves Crucible\u2019s journey to a (dilapidated) Hell:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A battered punt was moored by the river. The Devil helped Crucible in and picked up the skulls\u2014pardon me\u2014sculls.
\u201cWhat happened to what\u2019s-his-name\u2014Charon?\u201d
\u201cWe don\u2019t like to talk about it.\u201d
\u201cOh.\u201d
Silence, except for the creaking of the oars.
\u201cOf course, you\u2019ll have to replace this by a bridge.\u201d
\u201cOh, yes.\u201d
Crucible looked thoughtful.
\u201cA ha\u2019penny for them.\u201d
\u201cI am thinking,\u201d said Crucible, \u201cabout the water that is lapping about my ankles.\u201d  p. 70<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the story (spoiler) sees the Devil do a lot of advertising appearances in an effort to promote Hell as a tourist destination, and the Other Place soon resounds to the general bedlam of humanity: the sounds of its many visitors\u2019 jazz and pop music, their motorcycles, the click of slot machines, etc.
After a few weeks of this the Devil has had enough, at which point God appears out of a thunderstorm and asks him if he wants to come back up to Heaven. The Devil accepts the offer.
God then thanks Crucible, who has planned the whole endeavour with this outcome in mind.
This is a cutesy story, but it\u2019s neatly and amusingly done\u2014<\/span>and it is a particularly impressive debut for a 14 year old. I wonder what became of this writer.1<\/sup>
** (Average). 3,650 words.

1. Yes, joking: Terry Pratchett\u2019s ISFDB page<\/a>. I got about twenty books into the Discworld series (about half way through) before the increasingly bloated size of some of the volumes started wearing me out (he always seemed to be incapable of efficiently wrapping up the story). Still, I must go back and re-read some of the better ones.
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The Hades Business by Terry Pratchett (Science Fantasy #60, August 1963) opens with its protagonist, Crucible, arriving home and finding smoke in the hallway of his house. When he takes a bucket of water to the source of the fire in the study and charges the stuck door, it opens suddenly and he flies through […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[385],"tags":[370,17,216,12,386],"class_list":["post-1589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-terry-pratchett","tag-370","tag-17","tag-science-fantasy","tag-short-story","tag-terry-pratchett"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1589"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1673,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1589\/revisions\/1673"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}