Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes

written on October 18, 2026, read February 2019

I’ll admit it right away: I bought this book for one reason only. I had seen the film Arrival and liked it immediately. The film is based on Ted Chiang’s novella “Story of Your Life”, which is part of the German collection Die Hölle ist die Abwesenheit Gottes (“Hell Is the Absence of God”). When I learned that, I naturally wanted to read it. In my experience, film adaptations are rarely better than their source material. But if I had liked the adaptation that much, how much more would I like Chiang’s story?

In the book, “Story of Your Life” is a much quieter story than the film, but to my mind also a more beautiful one. It contains the fable of the Book of Ages, and you find yourself wishing Chiang would write about it. By the time you reach the end, at the latest, you know that you have just read it. And when you lean back on the sofa, you realize that you knew it all along without being aware of it.

What surprised me (I hadn’t read anything by Chiang before) is how good the other stories in this collection are as well.

For me, “Tower of Babylon”, from the same collection, is above all a story about how one question leads to the next, and how the answer brings you back to where you started. You think you have made progress in understanding the world, but in truth you only know one more thing, and in exchange you have infinitely more questions. And the people around you don’t understand why you despair.

As an atheist, I found the title story, “Hell Is the Absence of God”, a little hard to read, but its premise is quite interesting. What if you knew that God exists, but that he is neither always good nor always benevolent, merely capricious, and at times indifferent to everything, the believer most of all? And what if his angels arrived as hosts of chaos, not out to make things better but simply to change them? What if you took this speculative higher being out of the equation and replaced it with a religious leader demanding allegiance? I would argue that in such a universe, heaven would be the absence of God. Yet even after everything that happens to him, the protagonist still sees it differently. And that is perhaps where the story asks its most important question: what does it actually mean when the love for this God does not fade, even once his true nature has become obvious? A really well-written story. Still, there was too much God in it for me.¹

The book holds two more stories, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” and “Exhalation”, which I consider just as accomplished. I came for Arrival and stayed for the other stories. I ordered the companion volume, Das wahre Wesen der Dinge, right afterwards.

I should also issue a warning of sorts: anyone who has seen Arrival and expects suspenseful science fiction in the conventional sense will be disappointed. Much of what is in the film simply doesn’t appear in the story. In return, you are rewarded with plenty of food for thought.