Blameless in Abaddon

Nebula Award nominee 1997.

In Towing Jehovah, the discovery of the two-mile-long corpse of God in the mid-Atlantic proved a serious menace both to navigation and to faith. But was God truly dead, as the nihilists and the New York Times believed? In Blameless in Abaddon, his body – comatose yet far from inert – has been hauled from its temporary resting place in the Arctic to Florida, where it has become the Main Attraction at Orlando's Celestial City USA. And now one Martin Candle, a small-time and sore-afflicted judge practicing in Abaddon Township, Pennsylvania, proposes further travels for the Corpus Dei: to the World Court in the Hague, to answer for history's injustices large and small.

In his quest to counter the world's great theodicies, Martin embarks on an astonishing odyssey through the mind of the creator, where Lot's wife proves a most convenient way of adding salt to a margarita glass, early hominids vigorously debate Augustinian doctrine over jasmine tea, and Martin's alter ego, Job, keeps an eternal vigil atop his dung heap. Once the Trial of the Millennium has begun, Martin will understand why Abaddon is another name for Hell.