In “The Reading Cure,” Gabe Haley asks, “How can a seven-hundred-year-old poem have such a profound effect on a twenty-first-century reader?” Dante’s Divine Comedy is, among other things, a work of speculative fiction. Because Dante’s vision of the future is of the afterlife, its present conditions have the potential to encompass times outside of Dante’s own day and age. Unlike, say, a future set in 1984, a year that came and went, Dante’s future is set perpetually before the living.
