John C Flavin
Genre: Satire/Comedy
Product: Novel
Below is an excerpt from the 400-page satirical novel (standard paperback, The Big World. The Director of Limbo and narrator–Neither Nor Johnson–takes his readers on a tour of the one, real afterworld: Heaven and hell.
Neither-Nor Johnson:
God has determined that this whole Apocalypse thing really isn’t necessary after all. Officially, he didn’t make a mistake; he changed his mind. You see, the problem with allowing Satan to burn the Earth and punish sinners forever is that, unlike here in the Afterworld, you mortal sinners after the Apocalypse would get no chance for redemption. If you were caught red‑handed being sinful at the turn of the twentieth century–you know, stabbing someone for money or raping your kid–and Satan gets loosed upon the Earth, that’s it, you’re done for. No redemption. You don’t get to say, “Just kidding!”
That’s the nice thing about the Afterworld, you can always be redeemed. God always Forgives.
Let me tell you a little story. One time, you see, a baby was born. And when that baby was born, so was Love. Although it’s true that people have always fallen in Love, wrestled with Love, and some have even hated It, because, unrequited, Love kind of sucks. But experiencing love sensations and Affirming Love through one’s Faith in God, well, they are two entirely different things.
So there was Jesus, the baby, the boy: a walking, living, breathing embodiment of Love’s Affirmation through Faith in God. Muhammad? Same deal, but he didn’t have the same impact on people because his timing was off by a few hundred years; sequels are rarely as captivating as the original. Eastern religions are awesome, too. Anyway, the story goes that Satan saw God’s spontaneous little offspring spreading this Passion throughout the land, and he could see that the people were gobbling up His Word like chocolate.
Well, just as I had predicted–although no one will admit it–Satan wanted his share of the fun, too. He turned to God, after observing Jesus for a while, and said with remarkable composure, “I want to be among the mortals, too! It’s not fair that Jesus gets to and I don’t! It’s not fair!” Satan was jealous of the new baby in the family, and God did the Honorable thing. He acknowledged that Satan was right.
(Above: 5-inch carving of the crucified Jesus at Maryhill Museum)
It was not fair at all that Jesus got to walk among the mortals, but not Satan, and He turned to the little horned fellow, and said, “How right you are, youngun’. I will give you that opportunity as well, and it will be a thousand years thus. You shall be loosed upon the Earth and you shall wreak havoc on all the sinners in whatever manner you see fit; come the next millennium, Satan, you shall punish sinners directly, and the tiny watery planet will be yours to set aflame.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.
If ya ask me, He was letting Satan do his dirty work.
By this time, Satan held his hands under his chin and he curled and mingled his fingers together. With a great big smile, eyes wide and fixed on nothing in particular, and without moving his lips, he uttered, “Really? Little ol’ me?”
He snarled for a short while over the issue of having to wait a thousand years. But Satan bided his time and before long, around C.E. 476, he began gathering heat from below the Earth’s surface and doing trial re‑runs with great volcanic blasts and burning whole towns and villages. He even tried firing up a few bags of cats just to see what sound effect he might get. By C.E. 999, Satan was ready. The rivers would scald gorges into the ground, the rain would melt everything, the sun would burn holes into flesh, the water supply would all be polluted with toxins, whole plant and animal species would vanish, and the world of sinners would suffer eternal damnation by the direct command of Satan. Just as we all had been promised!
But then suddenly, God came to him right as he prepared to pounce. He said, “Satan?”
Distracted and annoyed, Satan looked up to God and said, “God?”
God said, “If you wait to be loosed upon the Earth toward the end of the second millennium, there will be an explosion.”
He said no more. That was all. Satan pleaded with God to tell him what kind of explosion would take place, or what it meant. But God offered no reply. He simply folded his arms in Holy defiance. But Satan is a clever fellow, and he knew God wouldn’t bother him right at that very moment for some petty explosion. He had nearly six mortal hours‑‑until sunrise‑‑on the first day of the second millennium of Jesus’ crucifixion (AD 1,033; 6:29 a.m., to be exact) to determine the meaning of God’s riddle. He paced back and forth, mulled it over, and then amputated and castrated a few demons in chaotic frustration.
“What does it all mean? Damn His mysterious ways!”
Suddenly, Satan’s prehistoric intuition offered advice, as if a miniature version of himself sat upon his own shoulder, saying, “Go with it. Wait until millennium number two.” Satan obeyed the miniature version of himself and though he didn’t know it at the time, his gamble paid off dearly: the explosion God foresaw was the population explosion.
It took Satan until the year 1811 to realize that he had not been fooled; the number of people on earth had gone from well below one billion to double that. Advancements in technology allowed for almost seven billion potential sinners in 2000, just 33 wee years before the 2nd millennium would officially lapse.
Satan was rewarded for his decision to be patient and to trust that God would not play a trick on him‑‑and the little red fellow whispered to himself: “More people equals fewer resources equals deeper poverty equals greater misery equals more sin equals additional burning bodies.” And then he raised his hands up high and curled his fingers in a really corny and typical bad guy sort of way. His eyes lit with the thought of torment, and he spewed saliva while loudly rejoicing the words, “I will have a terrific bonfire!”
Well, since 1811, Satan has been wringing his hands because, being the bright man that he is, he foresaw that wars must slow down relative to birth rates, disease would be reined in through modern medicine, and thus, the population must grow. He figured out as easily as anyone that the more people there are, the more sinners there are. No matter what event may take place on Earth, he reasoned, the cumulative sinner quotient rises as the population rises. “Exponentially, on top of that,” I think is what he said. I have no idea if that’s mathematically true, but it sounds good.
Ironically (or fittingly, I’m not sure which), it was God’s words, “Be fruitful and multiply,” that really made that equation exponential, or whatever, and Satan’s joy all the more.
This brings us to the purpose of this tour, this diversion. It is my task to keep Satan preoccupied beyond the year 2033. If I succeed, then‑‑boom! He’s blown his chance to, and I quote, “…be loosed on the earth.” Also, if I succeed, we get another 1,000 years to try to figure out how to ward off Satan’s next big shot at Armageddon.
But if I fail, all I can say to you, is: if you haven’t already, repent.
Why It’s Unique
In the marketplace of fictional reading, there is nothing like The Big World. It is researched and historically-based, but it is also a light-hearted, satirical story where Dante’s Inferno meets Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Writing The Big World was fun because my narrator possesses an immense amount of power and freedom. Neither-Nor Johnson is a 1st-person omniscient narrator. Normally a 1st-person main character is limited to his own experience because s/he is part of the story; here, he is omniscient because God grants him access to all the information in the universe–and he’s the main character.
Because Neither-Nor (being the Director of Limbo) is without a moral structure, and therefore does not care one way or the other about right and wrong, it enables him to say anything without consequence or political correctness.
Being ordained by God, Neither-Nor only tells the truth and is always reliable, whether the reader likes what he says or not. He’s allowed to not care who suffers or who rejoices, so it gives me license as author to play God at least as long as I tell the story from his point of view.
Writing from an indifferent perspective is liberating, and for the reader, that sense of freedom translates into a playfulness.
If readers wants to know how Satan punishes Hitler, whatever happened to Princess Diana, or what, exactly, God looks like, then The Big World is the right story to read.
Finally, the story is intentionally oriented toward Western religion because, while I am not a student of the thousands of religions our world offers, I find it easy to satirize Christianity in all of its marvelous historical and present-day manifestations.
Comment on Facebook at: John C Flavin on Facebook, or
Here’s a another account of human history via short animation:
“The Gloaming” (Posted with permission from Nobrain Director(s).)