Pluto (mythology) with the Eleusinian Mysteries, in which Pluto was venerated as a stern ruler but the loving husband of Persephone. The couple received souls in the afterlife, and are invoked together in religious inscriptions. Hades, by contrast, had few temples and religious practices associated with him, and he is portrayed as the dark and violent abductor of Persephone. Pluto and Hades differ in character, but they are not distinct figures and share two dominant myths. In Greek cosmogony, the god received the rule of the underworld in a three-way division of sovereignty over the world, with his brother Zeus ruling the
Hell Is the Absence of God single SF story of 2002". Conversely, John C. Wright called it a "trite antichristian propaganda". Elf Sternberg has compared the novelette to C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce", saying that although Lewis is a supporter of God, Chiang is "far more ambivalent". In a review of Chiang's "Stories of Your Life and Others" in "The Guardian", English fantasy author China Miéville called "Hell Is the Absence of God" the showpiece of Chiang's collection. He wrote that despite the story's religious underpinnings, there is no "moralistic "Sturm und Drang", and Chiang "does not descend to the finger-wagging one might expect from