The new book of Job

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The new book of Job (AKA job, A Comedy of Justice ) is a science fiction - novel by Robert A. Heinlein from the year 1984. In it, the story of Alexander Hergenstadt Heimer is told, a man who again and again magically Parallel universes is hurled and finally experienced the day of judgment .

action

The main character of the novel is Alec Hergensheimer, member of a fundamental Christian sect in an alternative universe in which the USA is much more conservative and the Hindenburg disaster never occurred, while William Jennings Bryan was successful in his presidential candidacy.

When the action begins, he is on a cruise in Polynesia and finds himself forced by a bet to walk over hot coals. He loses consciousness and first has to find out that his tour group has left him and that he has to return to the ship alone. When he noticed increasingly grotesque inconsistencies - the dress code is much looser than he was used to, and women are shamelessly topless in public - he cannot help but realize that he has been thrown into an alternative universe.

He has taken the place of a man named Alec Graham, who has a relationship with the stewardess Margrethe and who carries an obscenely large amount of money with him as a money launderer for the Mafia. Just as Hergensheimer / Graham is about to compare his fingerprints with those on “his” passport, the ship collides with an iceberg and he and Margrethe are thrown overboard.

When they are rescued, they both find that they have ended up in another universe where they work as a dishwasher in Mexico. After experiencing multiple earthquakes and being transported through multiple universes - in one of these worlds, Wicca is the dominant religion in America - Alexander concludes that the end of the world and the rapture are imminent. Although he himself is definitely not in a state of grace as a result of breaking some of the Ten Commandments, he is more concerned about his consort Margrethe, who explains to him that she is a pagan who expects Ragnarok to be close and her changes to different worlds be the work of Loki .

When Alexander and Margrethe are praying in a church, the Holy Spirit suddenly descends on Alex and cleanses him of his sins, while only a little later the end of the world breaks: Alex is raptured and rushes up to heaven. Now that he does not need to breathe, eat or drink to survive, he does not realize that he has been resting for years to get to heaven. Meanwhile, a war breaks out on earth in the Middle East, in which several of the people he met on earth are martyrs whom he meets again as saints in heaven.

When Alex arrives in heaven, he is raised to the status of a saint, but gradually he realizes that heaven does not correspond to his ideas, and his firmly established Christian worldview is increasingly shaky:

It turns out that God and Satan are brothers, players in a much larger game, dwarfed by a Supreme Being. God insists on being worshiped and uses contradicting and awkward rules to curb his creatures, while Satan, against God's declared will, has transformed hell into a pleasant place.

After her death, Margrethe was taken to Valhalla by Odin, but Alexander is finally allowed to see her again.

Classification in the fictional universe of Heinlein

The universe in which the Wicca religion dominates seems to be the same as Heinlein's novel Revolt on Luna , as the lunar colonies Luna City and Tycho Under are mentioned. The demonic god Glaroon from the short story Sie is briefly alluded to as one of God's “colleagues”.

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German editions: