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Book To The Future! Where We're Going, We Don't Need Stones!: The Chronicle Of Young Satan, Chapter 9 • The Devil According to Mark Twain • The Devil’s Details • Episode 710

Book To The Future! Where We’re Going, We Don’t Need Stones!: The Chronicle Of Young Satan, Chapter 9 • The Devil According to Mark Twain

The Chapter

Chapter nine of The Chronicle of Young Satan opens with Theodore reflecting on the one thing he has never asked Satan: his own future. He’s been afraid to. What he has done, quietly and without telling anyone, is ask for Seppi’s — and received it in a set of beautifully bound, printed volumes, an encyclopedia of one boy’s entire life. He hid them away and only read a page or two at the start, enough to know Seppi’s next couple of days, which he discovered made spending time with Seppi completely unbearable, since he already knew every joke Seppi was going to tell, every prank he was going to pull, every “guess what” (chicken butt) before it arrived. He stopped reading ahead. He started reading the evening after, just to see how right it was. It was always right. And when he found out Seppi had done the same with his life — that both boys had been reading each other’s futures in parallel — the books became a kind of invisible correspondence that kept them connected across years and distances without a single letter having to be written.

Then the boys did what Tom and Huck would do: they used the books to fleece every kid in Eseldorf!

The Conversation

We dig into chapter nine’s two distinct movements, which feel, as we note, like two episodes of a Saturday morning cartoon compressed into a half hour. The first is funny: the boys run a betting operation using Seppi’s life book to predict outcomes before they happen — who wins the race, who loses the fight — and clean up, before expanding their operation to sell advance news to the newsletter man in the cathedral town ten miles up the river. He’s skeptical until everything they said came true the next day, and then his circulation explodes. They offer to sell him news a century ahead. His faith in them isn’t quite that strong. A couple of days is good enough.

The second movement is darker. This newsie is jailed as a wizard and the boys tell him he will escape the burning and live fifteen more years before being hanged if he waits five seconds to answer the jailor’s knock. Four gets his throat cut by year’s end. Six breaks his neck in three months and damns him. He has to be precise. He chooses to be hanged. We spend real time on this.

The chapter ends with Satan taking the boys on a tour through time and space and then delivering a prophecy about the future of Christian civilization that sounds uncomfortably like the present. He has watched thirteen civilizations rise, peak, and decay. Three of them were superior in every way to anything history knows. They were all, he says, shams and hypocrisies and tyrannies. England will reach its highest point in two centuries and then pick a quarrel with a couple of tiny Christian farming communities to please a dozen rich adventurers, and lose the best name any nation ever earned, and carry the stench of it to the end of her days.

Theodore says: “Satan, that wouldn’t happen if England had the true religion.”

Satan says: “Yes. The kind of treasure you have here in Austria. My uncle is thinking of introducing it to his dominions.”

Theodore says: “Satan, that would defile it.”

Satan pulls down the corner of his eye with one finger. End of chapter.

We Also Discuss

  • Whether you would want to know your own future, and where the line is between “I want to know if I get the job next week” and “I want to know the day I die” — and how the boys’ addiction to the books maps onto something Twain almost certainly knew about himself
  • The betting market angle: the boys’ operation is essentially insider trading, and we go deep on real-world prediction market scandals — including a recent case where someone bet on an assassination — and how this unfinished Twain story got there first
  • Whether the boys’ free-and-easy use of the life books contradicts what Twain established in chapter six about how fragile and dangerous it is to alter anyone’s future path — and what Satan would say if he caught them
  • Whether sci-fi is just fantasy with machines: an extended and deeply enjoyable tangent that lands, eventually, on Arthur C. Clarke and Begonia
  • The Chronicles of Narnia’s Professor Diggory argument for why Lucy must be telling the truth — which is genuinely the smartest thing C.S. Lewis ever wrote and we stand by that
  • Satan’s prophecy about England, which Twain was almost certainly writing about the Boer War, and which lands differently in 2026
  • The Japanese gesture akanbe — pulling down one’s lower eyelid as a gesture of sarcasm and mild taunting — which we discover is apparently what Satan is doing at the end of this chapter, making him the inventor of that emoji
The Devil is in the details. 
Join Lester Ryan Clark and Kynan Dias for a comedic deep dive into the history of the ultimate villain, tracking his journey through theology, Paradise Lost, and modern cinema.”