Humankind first ventured into space in 1961. More than twenty years earlier C.S. Lewis, author of The Chronicles of Narnia, wrote Out of the Silent Planet, the first book in a trilogy of stories linking space travel, alien minds, and a war within the solar system, to Lewis’s overarching view of a benevolent God. The results are strange, to say the least.
C.S. Lewis referred to this genre as “Scientifiction”, and I’m still not sure how he managed to write so convincingly about space-travel when he (well, everybody, really) knew so little about space. A lot of the stories and movies from the 1930’s-1940’s come across as goofy, or just plain ignorant (take a look at any MST3K treatment of a black-and-white space travel movie, and you’ll see what I mean), but Lewis’s version of space travel is beautiful and amazing, even if scientifically it’s all wrong. The whole trilogy is really more fantasy than science fiction, but I think it expresses the awe that people must have felt at the very idea of leaving the planet.
Out of the Silent Planet sets the tone for the series and introduces Ransom, the main character. Ransom is kidnapped and taken to Mars as a sacrifice to an alien race, the Sorns. Fortunately Ransom’s kidnappers completely misread the Sorns intentions, and Ransom spends several weeks on the planet known by the inhabitants as Malcandra, living with the hrossa, meeting the eldil and the séroni (the Sorns, who never asked for a human sacrifice in the first place), and basically proving to be a much better ambassador to Malcandra than his two kidnappers had been. He also learns that each planet in the solar system has its own angelic ruler, and that Earth, or Thulcandra, has been cut off from the rest of the planets due to its ruler, well, turning against God and bending the entire human population towards evil. (Keep in mind that at this point C.S. Lewis had fought and been wounded in the First World War, and was now seeing the unstoppable march to the Second. You can imagine he had a pretty dark view of where humanity was headed.) Lewis tackles the notion of good versus evil head-on in this trilogy, and occasionally he gets a bit preachy. It’s helpful to remember that he was reaching for something here, taking in all the fascinating scientific discoveries that were being made and trying to tie them to something spiritual. Mostly he creates this gorgeous and strange view of what Mars could have been like.
I’m going to skip ahead now to the third book, That Hideous Strength, mostly because it’s pretty disappointing. To me it just wasn’t a fitting end for the trilogy. For one thing it takes place entirely on Earth, instead of a C.S. Lewis-created fantasy world. It also suffers by being the only one in the trilogy not told from Ransom’s point of view (he’s too busy being the messianic character to do more than make a long-suffering, saintly appearance every once in a while). Mostly this book was just kind of annoying, and sort of boring. There’s a glimmer of interest every few chapters, but I just couldn’t find much to like about any of the characters. And preachy? Oh dear. Lewis had toned down his tendency towards sermonizing by the time he wrote the Narnia series, but here he pulls out all the stops. Read this one if you want to know how the story ends, but don’t expect to be too satisfied with the ending.
And then there’s the second book in the trilogy, possibly the best of the series, and definitely my favorite. I enjoyed Out of the Silent Planet, but I loved Perelandra. C.S. Lewis gets all David Niven-y here by creating a fantastic setting on the planet Venus that has no basis in reality, but is still dreamlike and lovely. I really want someone to create an illustrated version of this book, because Lewis has a gift for beautiful images: a silvery, cloud-covered Venus that’s mostly ocean, with floating, tree-covered islands draped over the waves like carpets. Mountains made of crystal. Other-worldly animals and plants for the main character to interact with (one of my favorite images is one of Ransom walking through a valley of waist-high shrubs, all of them topped with long red ribbons that flow in the breeze like waves). Plus there Action! Adventure! Preaching (not a lot, but it gets thicker near the end). And an ending where…well I’m not exactly sure how things worked out the way that they did. Or how most of it applies to the third book in the series.
C.S. Lewis was one of the foremost Christian writers, and his views of how to be a “good” Christian were a bit more…inflexible here than they became in his later books, so the religious tone may turn some people off. It’s still an epic story that I can read over and over just for the gorgeous imagery. And in February, HarperCollins released a collected version of all three books to celebrate the 75th anniversary of a trilogy that’s been reprinted more than fifty times since the original release. Pretty impressive for a sci-fi/fantasy story written before the genre even had that name.