Ralph Bennitt 30 min read

Back from a year's holiday posing as a college boy, Lucifer coasts down toward Hell, and finds the primrose highway Sin and Death built for him rather badly neglected.

Ralph Bennitt's 1956 story is a wry, satirical first-contact and social-SF fantasy of the Devil inspecting the modern world. Clever, tongue-in-cheek golden-age SF. Read it for a droll tale where Old Nick, freshly acquainted with humanity's ways, finds even Hell isn't what it used to be.

In its time

Published in 1956, during the 1950s, post-war optimism meets cold war anxiety.

Reading it

30 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).