More to C.S. Lewis than Narnia

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C.S. Lewis was a prolific writer. People who are aware of only his seven Narnia stories — the ones where he fits as much Christian theology as he can into allegories for children — are overlooking a lot.  From the nihilistic poetry that he wrote in the 1920s, when he was still an atheist, to his fourteen novels to his autobiography and his “Reflections on the Psalms,” and his numerous prose works of social commentary and Christian apologetics, this professor of English literature just couldn’t stop putting pen to paper.

The “Space Trilogy” — comprising the short novels Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra and the much longer That Hideous Strength — is one of his lesser known works. People aren’t even sure what to call it — “Space Trilogy,” because it involves space flight?  “Cosmic Trilogy”?  “Ransom Trilogy,” after the main character?

Nor does it fit neatly into any single genre.  If you naïvely classify it as “sci fi” because of the way the first book starts — with the protagonist being kidnapped by a pair of mad scientists and whisked away from Earth in a spaceship that they’ve built in their backyard — then you’ll struggle to explain the later books, or indeed even the later chapters in the first book, which sometimes read more like medieval fantasy, or a theological epic à la Paradise Lost, or a dystopia like Brave New World and 1984, or a common literary novel about stuck up intellectuals and their joyless marriages and worse social lives.

Nonetheless, the books are worth reading.  They are not, I must admit, any sort of fast-paced thrillers, nor do they have the deep worldbuilding of a full-fledged high fantasy.  And the science itself is outdated.  (Like most authors in the 1930s, Lewis gives at least three of the planets in our solar system breathable air, and he assumes that the outer planets are older than the inner planets.)

Yet when I consider the three novels as a whole, I find that they’re decently put together.  Lewis is a fine prose stylist, and he interweaves keen philosophical insights with scenes of stunning natural beauty, all while his deftly drawn characters make the constant choices between the good and the pretended good that lie under the hood of any really great novel.  At the same time, amid all the dated or outright fantastical elements, the reader will find quite a few ideas — especially in the third book — that are almost bizarrely apropos to our own day.

The whole project originated from a 1935 wager between Lewis and his friend and fellow Inkling, the Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien.  Both men had gotten to complaining about the spiritless and materialistic trends in what was then called “scientifiction,” and they decided the best response was to write a pair of such stories themselves — one about space travel and the other about time travel.

After a coin toss, Tolkien ended up with time travel, and he began work on a story called “The Lost Road.”  Being a perfectionist, he never finished it, though pieces of its plot ended up in the backstory to The Lord of the Rings.  Lewis, who got space travel, was not a perfectionist; he published his story, Out of the Silent Planet, in 1938 and followed it up with a pair of sequels in 1943 and 1945.

Out of the Silent Planet

The first story in Lewis’s trilogy begins when the protagonist, a Cambridge philologist named Elwin Ransom who’s gone on a walking tour of the English Midlands, stumbles upon an eerie country estate called “The Rise.”  There he is kidnapped by the great physicist Dr. Edward Weston and his accomplice, the businessman Richard Devine.  After imbibing a glass of drugged whiskey, he wakes up the next morning aboard a spaceship halfway between the Earth and the Moon.  Ransom, therefore, begins his journey through “Deep Heaven” in total ignorance of why he is being taken to a place called Malacandra.

“Do you mean a star called Malacandra?”

“Even you can hardly suppose we are going out of the solar system. Malacandra is much nearer than that: we shall make it in about twenty-eight days.”

“There isn’t a planet called Malacandra,” objected Ransom.

“I am giving it its real name, not the name invented by terrestrial astronomers,” said Weston.

“But surely this is nonsense,” said Ransom. “How the deuce did you find out its real name, as you call it?”

“From the inhabitants.”

It took Ransom some time to digest this statement. “Do you mean to tell me you claim to have been to this star before, or this planet, or whatever it is?”

“Yes.”

“You can’t really ask me to believe that,” said Ransom. “Damn it all, it’s not an everyday affair. Why has no one heard of it? Why has it not been in all the papers?”

“Because we are not perfect idiots,” said Weston gruffly.

The story unfolds from there.  First there is Ransom’s accidental discovery that, upon reaching Malacandra, Weston and Devine plan to give him to the “Sorns.”  Then there is the actual landing, and the men’s emergence from the spacecraft.

“He gazed about him, and the very intensity of his desire to take in the new world at a glance defeated him. He saw nothing but colours — colours that refused to form themselves into things. Moreover, he knew nothing yet well enough to see it; you cannot see things till you know roughly what they are.”

Then there is Ransom’s escape into the Malacandrian forest, and his lucky encounter with a Hross, a seven-foot-tall bipedal creature “something like a penguin, something like an otter, something like a seal; the slenderness and flexibility of the body suggested a giant stoat.”

After a journey downriver in the Hross’s boat, Ransom spends several months living among the Hrossa and learning their language.  From there the plot takes a turn much like James Cameron’s Avatar movies.  The man from Earth, at first compelled against his will to live among creatures who seem like savages, is slowly made to see things the other way around — it is Malacandra’s three species of hnau, the Hrossa, the Seroni or Sorns, and the Pfifltriggi, who are living the way that rational beings ought to live, and it’s his own people, who have come to the new planet to exploit it for their selfish purposes, who are the “bent hnau.”

Later, Ransom must make a dangerous journey across Malacandra’s awesomely high mountains to see Oyarsa, Malacandra’s angelic ruler.  On the way, a group of Sorns question him about his own planet — which they call Thulcandra, the “Silent Planet” of the title.

“They were astonished at what he had to tell them of human history — of war, slavery, and prostitution.

“It is because they have no Oyarsa,” said one of the sorns.

“It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,” said another.

“They cannot help it,” said the old sorn. “There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau, and hnau by Oyarsa. These creatures have no Oyarsa. They are like one trying to lift himself by his own hair — or one trying to see over a whole country when he is on a level with it — like a female trying to beget young on herself.”

Obviously there is far more to the story than I can describe here.  Suffice it to say that eventually Ransom meets Oyarsa — as do Weston and Devine, against their will — and at last the full scale of Weston’s villainous plans for Malacandra is laid bare.  Curiously, one of the main criticisms of Avatar — that it portrays the Na’vi as being helpless until a “white savior” appears in the form of Jake Sully to lead their battle for survival — is absent in Lewis’s book, where it’s clear that Oyarsa would have dealt with the “bent hnau” whether or not Ransom had shown up, and Ransom’s main purpose was simply to be a witness to these events and to carry his story back to Earth.

In a big sense, Out of the Silent Planet is a diatribe against fascism, written at the very tail end (1938) of the time when fascism was respectable.  And Weston’s climactic speech is a satire on the materialist worldview that gave rise to communism and fascism and the more progressive forms of liberalism — the materialist worldview with its refusal to look to God or the afterlife as sources of meaning, while evolution, either biological and social, justifies the higher races in supplanting and destroying the lower ones, all in furtherance of the onward and upward journey of growth and progress and cosmic immortality.

It is quite possible to read Silent Planet as a simple anti-colonialist narrative, with the villainy of the modern white man pitted against the noble savages, but this would be a superficial reading.  There are of course anti-colonialist themes in the book, but at root it is all theological — Lewis is asking what would happen if we encountered an unfallen world.

When the villains expect that their carrot-and-stick methods — their “pretty-things” and their “poof-bangs” — will make the ignorant natives do whatever they want, they’re working from experience.  They know full well that when white men explored the wild parts of their own world, they found no shortage of greedy chiefs who would happily sell their neighbors into perpetual slavery for a jug of cheap whiskey. Basically, encounters between two branches of Adam’s fallen race produced the expected results.  The hnau of Malacandra, who live in harmony with one another and with their angelic overlords, and who have never known greed or fear, are something else.

Is Out of the Silent Planet still relevant today?  Yes.  It has plenty of the timeless truths that one will find in any really enduring piece of literature.  Nonetheless, one can’t help but notice that the specific perversion of ethics that Weston represents isn’t one that we see today.

With Nazi Germany and the global eugenics movement having long since fallen, the crasser forms of modernist triumphalism have become déclassé.  Nowadays, the enemies of Christendom prefer to lure us into tyranny with false promises to end suffering and oppression, rather than to nakedly assert “the right of the higher over the lower.” Even so, the dénouement of Lewis’s story still raises hard questions about just how many of the things we consider to be progress and civilization are really just our attempts to hide from our own “bent” nature.

Who should read Out of the Silent Planet?  Just about everyone.

Even young children, I think, will like it — I began reading it at age eight or nine, before I had even finished the Narnia books.  Though one must come back to it as an adult to fully understand its themes.

Silent Planet is the shortest volume of the trilogy and also, strange as it may seem to say it, the least religious of the three.  Granted, the story would make no sense without its religious message, and its cosmology is more explicitly Christian than that of, say, The Silmarillion.  (Although Tolkien was at least as devout as Lewis, he thought that explicit allegory made bad art.)  Nonetheless, the first half of the Silent Planet narrative wouldn’t be too out of place in an H.G. Wells or Robert A. Heinlein story, and only a few lines of the book would have to be dropped in order to make the Malacandrians’ theology consistent with that of a Muslim, a Jew, or a Sikh.

That changes quickly when one moves on to Book Two.

Twilight Patriot is the pen name for a young American who lives in South Carolina, where he is currently working toward a graduate degree.  You can read more of his writings — including his reviews of the other two volumes in the Space Trilogy — at his Substack.

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