Book Review: C. S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy

My thoughts on one of the premier works of Christian science fiction.

C. S. Lewis was a very prolific writer. People who are only aware of 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 essays 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 lengthier 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? “Planetary Trilogy?” “Ransom Trilogy,” after the main character?

Nor does it fit neatly into any single genre. If you naively 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 a la Paradise Lost, or a dystopia like Brave New Work 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 And the science itself is outdated.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 the outer planets are older than the inner planets.)

Yet when I consider the three novels as a whole, I find that they’re artfully 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’ 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 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 biped “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’ 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’ book, where it’s clear that Oyarsa would have dealt with the “bent hnau” whether or not Ransom showed up, and Ransom’s main purpose is 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 climatic 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 each other 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 commonly 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 denouement of Lewis’ 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, 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. (While 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.

Perelandra

Here, Elwin Ransom is carried to a second planet – the Perelandra of the title – by angels, or eldila, on an explicit mission from Maleldil, or God. The newborn world of Perelandra is, like the ancient Malacandra, an unfallen world – but perhaps not for long. Ransom’s purpose is to persuade this planet’s equivalent of Eve not to bring sin into her world.

This time, it’s not the forbidden fruit. On the ocean planet of Perelandra, the “Queen” and her husband live on rafts or floating islands made of dense, fragrant plants loaded with all sorts of friendly animals and pleasant foods. And Ransom, even before he learns his mission, learns to share in their innocent pleasures.

“He found a rich crop of oval green berries, about three times the size of almonds. He picked one and broke it in two. The flesh was dryish and bread-like, something of the same kind as a banana. It turned out to be good to eat. It did not give the orgiastic and almost alarming pleasure of the gourds, but rather the specific pleasure of plain food—the delight of munching and being nourished... He felt he ought to say grace over it; and so he presently did. The gourds, on the other hand, would have required rather an oratorio or a mystical meditation….”

The floating islands – islands on which the hills rise and fall with the waves beneath them – are frequently rearranged by the wind and the currents; this is how, several days before Ransom arrives, the Queen has been separated from “the King.” She has no idea how long it will be until they’re reunited, and in fact we don’t see him until the end of the book.

The First Couple of Perelandra have only one commandment – while they may explore the “fixed land” by day, they must not stay there overnight. (If this seems like an arbitrary rule meant simply to mirror our own planet’s forbidden fruit, don’t worry – as with nearly everything Lewis does there is a philosophical meaning behind it.)

Dr. Weston shows up again, still as a villain, but not a materialist like he was in Book One. For Lewis, people who think they’re serving nothing higher than themselves are wrong, and they’re never far away from being claimed by their real master. Thus it is that, a moment after splashdown, Weston is rowing away from his sinking spacecraft in a little inflatable punt, not seeming to care if he ever gets home again so long as he can fulfil his role as the Tempter and make Genesis 3 happen all over again.

What follows is a continuation of the book’s lengthy philosophical discussions about virtue, obedience, the right and wrong ways to enjoy pleasures, sin, God, Satan, Satanic possession, courage, and redemption. What’s more, in keeping with the Genesis theme, Ransom is naked throughout all of this – and also through the epic multi-day fight scene that just might have been the inspiration for Gandalf’s battle with the Balrog in Book II of The Lord of the Rings.

To a certain degree, my feelings about this book were coloured by a theological disagreement between myself and the author. Lewis takes what I might as well call the “traditional” Christian view of the Fall of Man – that it was a catastrophic departure from God’s plan for mankind that brought a huge amount of needless suffering into the world, including the suffering of God himself when he was born as a man to redeem us. Ransom’s object in Lewis’ story is to spare Perelandra that same fate, and let it enjoy the pristine, unfallen destiny that Earth was meant to have. (“Because it did not happen in your world [Earth], a greater thing [the Incarnation] happened, but not this.”)

Yet my own take on the Fall story, even before I began seeing it as allegory (“Adam” is Hebrew for “man,” his acts and fate represent the collective experience of the human race) was more like the Jewish or Mormon interpretation. That is, it was what God expected and planned for all along. Adam and Eve simply did what any human being, lacking a real, firsthand “knowledge of good and evil,” would have sooner or later done. If it was God’s plan for the rest of us to be born into sinless world, then he would have destroyed Adam and Eve and started over, but he didn’t.

Oddly, Lewis’ book provides a sort of backhanded support to the latter view of the Fall as a necessary evil, since Maleldil’s chosen method of saving Perelandra is to send a representative of a planet where mankind did fall, and where men do have to experience good and evil all the time. And it’s this man who uses his experience to talk the new Eve out of doing the forbidden thing.

And yet, philosophical disagreements aside, Perelandra is still a book I can recommend. Like the first one it is a beautifully written story with more sides to it than I can describe here. It delightfully refuses to be contained within any particular genre, and it presents the reader with no shortage of memorable ideas about temptation and loyalty and courage and love.

“We have learned of evil, though not as the Evil One wished us to learn. We have learned better than that, and know it more, for it is waking that understands sleep and not sleep that understands waking. There is an ignorance of evil that comes from being young: there is a darker ignorance that comes from doing it….”

Will everyone enjoy Perelandra? No. I suspect that anyone who isn’t both a Christian and an intellectual will be bored stiff by it. But you just might have to read it anyway, because the third volume of the trilogy is just so good.

That Hideous Strength

If Perelandra is the pastoral and meditative counterpart to the first volume’s classic adventure story, then the third book, That Hideous Strength, is the most unique of them all. At some moments, it reads like medieval high fantasy, at others, like a novel about college professors and their social lives, and at yet others it reads like a dystopia along the lines of 1984 or Brave New World.

The opening is humdrum enough – after a few paragraphs describing the mildly unhappy marriage between Mark and Jane Studdock, a pair of childless young academics, the narrator moves on to relate a dull faculty meeting at the college where Mark works. One item of business, handled fairly quickly, is the sale of “Bragdon Wood,” a tract of land that means little to the “progressive element” of the faculty, though for more than a millennium it had been held sacred on account of a legend that this wood is the resting place of the wizard Merlin.

Lewis, who subtitled the book “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups,” says in his Preface that

“I have called this a fairy-tale in the hope that no one who dislikes fantasy may be misled by the first two chapters into reading further, and then complain of his disappointment. If you ask why – intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels – I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters, and petty kings with which a fairy-tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories. They were, indeed, more realistic and commonplace than Bracton College is to me…”

Much of the story in That Hideous Strength is devoted to working out, in narrative form, ideas that Lewis had already developed in his prose essays “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring.” Persons who dislike fairy tales are directed there instead; the rest of us get to read on, and watch Mark Studdock, sometime Fellow of Bracton College, face a big temptation.

Unlike the heroine of Perelandra, Mark falls for it immediately. Shortly after the book begins, he is approached by Richard Devine, who (having learned nothing from his experience on Malacandra) has now bought himself a peerage and, as Lord Feverstone, is recruiting academics to work at the N.I.C.E. – the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments. Soon Mark is at the Institute’s headquarters, trying to get into this – would “think tank” be the right word? It’s a quasi-governmental organization aimed at not only making science more ‘scientific,’ but giving ‘the experts’ the political and media power that they need to condition everybody else to live the safer, cleaner, more efficient lives that their new science will make possible. As one of its enthusiasts puts it:

“The N.I.C.E marks the beginning of a new era – the really scientific era. Up to now everything has been haphazard. This is going to put science itself on a scientific basis. There are to be forty interlocking committees sitting every day and they’ve got a wonderful gadget – I was shown the model last time I was in town – by which the findings of each committee print themselves off in their own little compartment on the Analytical Notice-Board every half hour…”

After which another character says:

“I don’t give a fig for pragmatometers and sanitation de luxe. The real thing is that this time we’re going to get science applied to social problems and backed by the whole force of the state, just as war was backed by the whole force of the state in the past. One hopes, of course, that it’ll find out more than the old free-lance science did; but what’s certain is it can do more.”

Mark Studdock has mixed feelings about the N.I.C.E. – indeed he never stops having mixed feelings about it until the end of the book – because Mark, while having the rudiments of a conscience, is also an irascible striver. Ever since he was a child he’s never wanted anything so much as to be part of the “inner ring” – whatever group of people is the most prestigious, the most in-the-know. And he’s always been willing to do things he doesn’t like doing to impress people he can’t stand to be around, and to let real friendships fall by the wayside, all to get that knowing look from the dominant schoolboy, that place in the “progressive element” of Bracton’s faculty, that enviable salary that the N.I.C.E. is dangling in front of him.

So the fact that everyone Mark meets at the N.I.C.E. is deeply irritating, and that most of what they tell him about themselves turns out to be false, doesn’t make him stop wanting to be inside rather than outside.

As a foil for Mark, we see the physical chemist Bill Hingest, whose actual scientific accomplishments surpass those of everyone else at Bracton, and who also gets wooed (albeit without result) by the N.I.C.E.

“I came here because I thought it had something to do with science. Now that I find it’s something more like a political conspiracy, I shall go home.”

“You mean, I suppose, that the social planning doesn't appeal to you?” says Mark. “I can understand that it doesn't fit in with your work as it does with sciences like sociology, but–”

“There are no sciences like sociology. And if I found chemistry beginning to fit in with a secret police run by a middle-aged virago who doesn't wear corsets, and a scheme for taking away his farm and his shop and his children from every Englishman, I’d let chemistry go to the devil and take up gardening again.”

It’s Hingest’s bluntness about everything he’s seen (and yes, this “Institute” does turn out to have its own secret police) that leads his more progressive colleagues to denounce him as “the wrong sort of scientist.”

While all of this is happening, Mark’s wife Jane – who has found, much to her own consternation, that she has the gift of seership – is grappling with her own temptations. And to her good fortune, instead of falling deeper and deeper into the clutches of the N.I.C.E. like her husband, she winds up at a pleasant country manor, in a sort of benevolent secret society led by the “Director.” This Director is Elwin Ransom himself, who has now become a sort of prophet, conferring regularly with the Oyarses of Malacandra and the other planets as he prepares his followers for spiritual warfare with the N.I.C.E.

Much to their own detriment, Mark and Jane never let each other in on their secrets. They’re too intent on having a ‘modern’ marriage, where each retains a lot of independence, for them to show any real love or trust for each other until the end of the story.

Yet while Jane is with Ransom’s people, learning what real friendship means, Mark is continuing the descent into scoundreldom that’s the price of admission to the N.I.C.E.’s inner ring. Soon he is hard at work writing fake news stories to prepare public opinion for N.I.C.E. rule – at one point he writes, the day before it happens, about a riot which will break out when his bosses dump a huge number of migrant workers on a certain English town, intending to use the unrest as a cause to assume “emergency powers” over the half-destroyed community. (Yes, Lewis was writing this in 1945 – sometimes the future is visible a long ways off.)

Perhaps you have heard the saying about how there are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them? Mark’s new boss, Miss Hardcastle, is no stranger to this:

“Why you fool, it's the educated reader who CAN be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they're all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the high-brow weeklies, don't need reconditioning. They're all right already. They'll believe anything.”

There’s no way to really summarize this book’s philosophy here, so I won’t try. A few more isolated samples of N.I.C.E. ideology will have to do. We readers follow Mark Studdock as he hears an eminent biologist talking giddily about how it won’t be long before he and his colleagues find a way to “clean the planet” and replace all the world’s trees with aluminum trees:

“No leaves to fall, no twigs, no birds building nests, no muck and mess…. On the art tree I would have the art birds all singing when you press a switch inside the house. When you are tired of the singing you switch them off. Consider again the improvement. No feathers dropped about, no nests, no eggs, no dirt.”

“It sounds,” said Mark, “like abolishing pretty well all organic life.”

“And why not? It is simple hygiene….”

All the talk about eliminating poverty and crime and disease is just the N.I.C.E.’s outer wrapper. What they’re really working toward is a lifeless world of disembodied minds – at least, this is their vision for the minority of the human race that’s fit for the life of the mind; for the rest there are other fates. And the people at the very top of the N.I.C.E. – those who are actually in contact with the “macrobes,” the disembodied intelligences directing the whole affair – are envious of the underground civilization on the Moon, which is further along on the same path:

“There dwell an accursed people, full of pride and lust. There when a young man takes a maiden in marriage, they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicati) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.”

So here we see C. S. Lewis anticipating… sexbots? Yes, we do.

Doubtless, there will be obstacles to the N.I.C.E.’s anti-nature program, and there will be people who desire to stick to the old ways. But the enlightened minds at the Institute know that free will is bunk, and that human desires are after all only the arbitrary product of chemicals in the body… except of course for their own desires, which are objective and scientific.

But again and again the mask slips. “What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument…”

Meanwhile, Ransom and his companions out in the countryside have their own attitudes toward nature and its ‘messiness:’

“We both like Weather. Not this or that kind of weather, but just Weather. It's a useful taste if one lives in England.”

“How ever did you learn to do that, Mr. Denniston?” said Jane. “I don't think I should ever learn to like rain and snow.”

“It's the other way round,” said Denniston. “Everyone begins as a child by liking Weather. You learn the art of disliking it as you grow up. Noticed it on a snowy day? The grown-ups are all going about with long faces, but look at the children - and the dogs? They know what snow's made for.”

“I'm sure I hated wet days as a child,” said Jane.

“That's because the grown-ups kept you in,” said Camilla. “Any child loves rain if it's allowed to go out and paddle about in it.”

I have to quote so much because I cannot summarize; there can be no good summaries of something that tramples on genre boundaries as merrily as Lewis’ unfolding tale. From the humdrum he moves to the macabre (just who, or what, is “The Head” to which the people at the N.I.C.E. pay homage?). From the sinister (underground torture chambers) he jumps to the philosophical, from the moralistic (contraception is really, really bad!) to the whimsical (several pages narrated from the point-of-view of a half-tame brown bear) to the magical (Atlantis! King Arthur! The Oyarses of the Five Planets! And Merlin, who after fifteen centuries isn’t dead after all!) to the just plain British: for instance, in a land hardly touched by the temperance movement, an American like myself can’t help but wonder at how bibulous Lewis’ characters are – heroes and villains alike.

I could not avoid noticing just how much of George Orwell’s 1984 is borrowed from That Hideous Strength. Not only is there a resemblance in the torture scenes (which, in both tales, follow carefully designed programs to break a man psychologically, and make him end up loving the people who broke him) but also in that both stories are largely told from the perspective of a humble fake-news writer whose attempts to get further into the inner ring, or the Inner Party, bring him face to face with layers of unpleasant characters whose idealistic prattle peels away, onionlike, to reveal that at bottom they’re just after power for power’s sake.

Orwell, for his part, wrote a review of That Hideous Strength, in which he praised many of the book’s ideas while concluding that “On the whole, novels are better when there are no miracles in them.”

Three year later, when Orwell wrote 1984, he ended his story with despair. The total state is secure; it’s always been secure. Winston and Julia learn to love Big Brother. “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face— forever.”

Lewis ends his story with hope: Elwin Ransom and Jane Studdock and their companions (including the wizard Merlin) defeat the N.I.C.E. Mark Studdock finally has a change of heart and gets rescued from the Institute’s dungeons. Even Mr. Bultitude, the brown bear, gets his moment of triumph.

Of course, in the real world we seldom see such fairytale endings. But neither do we get complete despair. The total states that inspired Orwell’s work – that is, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union – didn’t fall in fairytale fashion like the newborn dystopia that Lewis portrays here, but they didn’t last forever, either.

Lewis knew full well that, by explicitly writing “a fairy-tale for grown-ups” he was producing a work that a lot of people wouldn’t enjoy, or wouldn’t understand, or wouldn’t bother to read in the first place. But those of us who do read it should have little trouble understanding what he is trying to say.

He gives his tale a happy ending because it is part and parcel of the genre. His heroes have to show virtue at a few key moments – mainly the virtue of courage. But for the most part they succeed because the supernatural forces they call on are stronger than those of their enemies. The degree to which the forces of evil are (1) centralized under a single command structure, and (2) forthright about their evilness, are both exaggerated for literary effect.

The N.I.C.E. in Lewis’ novel is basically what a lot of right-wing conspiracy theorists imagine Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum to be, along with George Soros’ Open Society Foundation and Anthony Fauci’s National Institutes for Health. It is a conspiracy of Satan-worshipping intellectuals with a unified leadership, a well-staffed propaganda arm, connections in government, and plans for world domination – a conspiracy whose minions masquerade as benevolent scientists steering public policy toward progress and the common good.

In the real world, no organization quite like this exists. And yet, as Orwell said in his review, “Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realizable.”

We have already seen, in our concrete jungles and monocultured fields, a movement toward the time when “superfluous life is to be wiped out.” The “vile arts” by which Lewis’ moon people conceived their children are now a flourishing industry. Billions of dollars have been poured into research on cryopreservation and brain-computer interfacing and other technologies meant to ultimately bring about disembodied life.

Nor have the intellectuals at the helms of our nominally democratic societies failed to follow the N.I.C.E.’s example of propagandizing about democracy while finding ways to exclude the masses from any political decisions which they deem too important. Why did the United States legalize abortion and same sex marriage, ban religious activities from public schools, and grant partial rights of citizenship to illegal aliens by judicial fiat rather than an honest legislative vote? Why has our political class so easily escaped accountability for the lies necessary to get our country to invade Iraq, or to fund gain-of-function research?

And Lewis is not wrong when he insinuates that the excessive centralization of science – the quest to get rid of “haphazard” science, and to “put science itself on a scientific basis” – will lead to bad science.

Just consider one especially odious piece of social engineering that passes for science these days – the diagnosing and medicating of schoolchildren for ADHD. The symptoms for it, things like “is easily distracted,” “makes careless mistakes,” “squirms in chair” or “runs about and climbs excessively,” are qualities that exist to a greater or less degree in all children. They lead to a diagnosis when they interfere with the child’s schooling. And this usually has more to do with the qualities of the school, and with the willingness of the parents to accept growth suppression and lifelong drug dependency as the price for behavior changes, than it has to do with the child’s biology.

And yet, because the American Psychiatric Association has published this symptom list in the DSM-V, even scientists who are suspicious of all this have to pretend that the existence of ADHD is an objective fact, and that it afflicts a certain, measurable percentage of children worldwide (5 to 7%, or 7.2%, or… there’s no consensus here, but there doesn’t need to be) and that the rest are presumably “normal” children who don’t squirm in their chairs. Otherwise, one’s research won’t be taken seriously by the rest of the field or published in the best journals.

Could such a state of affairs exist in a world where “haphazard” scientists had to convince one another of their theories one paper at a time, and where there was no American Psychiatric Association, sloshing around with money from pharmaceutical firms, to just vote a diagnostic criterion into existence? Perhaps, but perhaps not. In any case, the project to “put science itself on a scientific basis” has certainly created a lot of unchecked power within scientific institutions, and thereby led to worse science.

And C. S. Lewis – even if he couldn’t foresee the details, and even if he chose an artistic medium that most people were bound to ignore – definitely put his finger on the pulse of some important trends that were already undoing civilization as he knew it. Or, as Elwin Ransom puts it near the end of the story:

“The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from Earth their mother and from the Father in Heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great Ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.”

I don’t know for certain how western civilization’s immoderate pursuit of power over nature (really, the “power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument”) will actually end. I have some ideas, but they would be out of place in this review. Suffice it to say that I am not as pessimistic as Orwell and Huxley were, when they made their dystopias everlasting. Like C. S. Lewis, I believe that there are higher Powers that will eventually have their way.

Who should read That Hideous Strength? Well, just about every religious person who wants to understand the Twentieth Century. Though even in saying that, I perhaps misspeak. Just consider one more quotation from the book:

“Then, quite sharply, it occurred to [Jane] that the Director never talked about Religion; nor did the Dimbles nor Camilla. They talked about God.”

There is so much philosophy in this novel (and in the other two) that I could go on almost forever. But I will not. If you had enough patience to read this very long review, then you will be ready to read the books themselves – I assure you they are much better!

The first part of this essay - my review of Out of the Silent Planet - also appeared in the American Thinker.