Just read 'Minerva Awakes' & 'Sympathy For The Devil', both by Holly Lisle, last night. Fantasy. I liked 'Sympathy For The Devil' better. It's about what happens when one woman, with all her soul, prays to God.
This is the prayer:
She looked up toward Heaven, and with her eyes wide open, she said, "Okay, God. I've had it. I've thought about this until I can't stand to think about it anymore, and now we're going to have to do something about it. You said that whatever we asked of you, if we had faith, you would give to us." She took a deep breath, and her hands clenched into fists.
"Hell is all wrong. You claim that we have free choice-the choice to love you or not, to follow you or not. But there isn't any choice to it. If a thief held a gun to my head and told me to give him my car keys or he'd kill me, I'd give him my keys . . . but nobody would say I did so of my own free will. And if he stuck the same gun to my head and told me to love him or else, I might pretend to love him . . . at least until I got hold of the gun.
"You're holding a gun to our heads, God. You're saying 'Love me or writhe in torment for eternity' and eternal torment is a pretty damned big gun for anything a person could do in eighty years.
"You claim to be a God of love. I say that only a sadistic, spoiled [censored] would torture someone for eternity, no matter what reason he had."
She exhaled slowly, and her eyes narrowed. "You said ask and believe. So now I'm asking. Let them have the chance to repent, God. All of them. Every single soul in Hell. Let them have the chance to learn from the mistakes they made; let them into Heaven if they repent.
"Until you do this, you can consider me a conscientious objector, protesting the policies of Heaven. When I die, you can send me to Hell, because I won't go to Heaven until every soul can find a way there, God. Every soul. No matter who they were, no matter what they did.
"Eternity is too long for a loving God to condone the torture of his [censored] ren."
The rest of the book is what happens when God grants this prayer, and Hell come to North Carolina...