Book review: Out of the Silent Planet / Perelandra / That Hideous Strength

Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength are "science fiction" books by C S "Narnia" Lewis. They all contain a great deal of Christian theology, to a degree that will surprise you even if you've read Narnia. All are well written and worth reading. THS has the best story; P has the least.

OOTSP (we are the silent planet) introduces us to a cosmology in some ways like the medieval model of The Discarded Image. Our hero, Ransom, is shanghaied there by the evil Devine (merely in it for the gold) and Weston (wants to kill all the natives and expand the human race forever outwards). Various things happen, and I will not spoil the plot by telling you what. In the end the good guys win by being overwhelmingly powerful. Lewis has fun with Weston trying to explain his purposes, but needing to be translated by Ransom, and so all the easy gloss is stripped out and replaced by the harshest truth.

In all the books Lewis is presenting the battle of good and evil; the men he uses to represent evil are modern "scientific man". But this is somewhat odd reading now; the things that Weston proposes are odd:  for example, we would not be sending spacecraft to Mars if we thought we'd be destroying interesting life. Perhaps it is closer to say that Lewis is preferring an older style of life, somewhat like Tolkien not liking Sandyman the miller.

P is kinda a re-telling of The Fall; the Tempter is Weston (or an evil spirit speaking through him) and this time Eve has an... anti-tempter, Ransom. The temptation this time is not a fruit but sleeping-on-fixed-land, and Lewis struggles to make sense of this, mostly by not doing so. Eventually, for obscure reasons, Ransom decides to change to physical conflict, and kills Weston: why this is an acceptable resolution I don't know. It becomes clear that Obedience is important to Lewis.

THS is the best story: a Young Lecturer is drawn into the inner circle of his college, and then into an institute called NICE, before becoming aware how evil it is. Devine returns as Lord Feverstone. The Kafkaesque inability of the YL to pin down NICE to any terms is reminiscent of The Castle. In the end, the theme of Obedience translates into the marriage of the YL and his wife Jane who realise that their modern views are wrong.

In a way I subscribe to Orwell's views (see here). Lewis believes very fundamentally in his Christian perspective, and that provides him with a Right Answer, but unfortunately only under the rulership of something else; humans become, effectively, non-adults: in the sense of not being self-governing. They must Obey. If you're Christian this is fine. If you're not... it provides nothing other than a vague nostalgia that some things were better in Ye Olde Dayes. I've had occasion to say before that governance is hard; palming it off on someone "good" is cheating.