Short Story:The Hades Business

The Hell business is just not paying. No-one's been down there for two thousand years except some chap called Dante, who got quite the wrong impression. The Devil wants Crucible, the owner of the Square Deal Advertising Company, to help him get it back up, with people having day trips, a grand day out for all the family and such. The entire place becomes increasingly popular, with restaurants and bars popping up all over the place, and teenagers flocking there, until it's only Hell for one person: the Devil himself.

“The Hades Business” - originally titled “Business Rivals” — was Terry Pratchett’s first published work. He wrote it for an English assignment at the age of thirteen (according to A Blink of the Screen) or fourteen (according to Terry Pratchett: A Life with Footnotes), and it was published in Pratchett’s school magazine, The Technical Cygnet, in December 1962 (when Pratchett was definitely fourteen). He submitted it to science fiction magazine editor John Carnell, who suggested some further edits. Pratchett tightened up the opening and added to the story’s length, and in 1963 Carnell accepted it for publication under the final title in Science Fantasy Magazine.

The Science Fantasy Magazine version was reprinted in the 1965 anthology The Unfriendly Future, and collected with other short Pratchett works in Once More* *with Footnotes and A Blink of the Screen.

External links

• “The Hades Business” at the Internet Speculative Fictional Database
• “The Hades Business” in Science Fantasy at archive.org