Black Easter is a Nebula Award-nominated fantasy novel by James Blish in which an arms dealer hires a black magician to unleash all the Demons of Hell on earth for a single day. It was first published in 1968. The sequel is The Day After Judgment. Together, those two very short novels form the third part of the thematic "After Such Knowledge" trilogy (title from T. S. Eliot's "Gerontion," "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") with A Case of ...
more
Black Easter is a Nebula Award-nominated fantasy novel by James Blish in which an arms dealer hires a black magician to unleash all the Demons of Hell on earth for a single day. It was first published in 1968. The sequel is The Day After Judgment. Together, those two very short novels form the third part of the thematic "After Such Knowledge" trilogy (title from T. S. Eliot's "Gerontion," "After such knowledge, what forgiveness?") with A Case of Conscience and Dr. Mirabilis. Black Easter was serialised as Faust aleph-null in If magazine.
Black Easter and The Day After Judgment were written using the assumption that the ritual magic for summoning demons as described in grimoires actually worked.
In the first book, a wealthy arms manufacturer comes to a black magician, Theron Ware, with a strange request: he wishes to release all the demons from hell for one night to see what might happen. The book includes a lengthy description of the summoning ritual, and a detailed (and as accurate...
less
