Author: Sanford Schwartz
Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2009
Price: £17.99 (hardback)
Isbn: 978015374728

Recent movies have introduced CS Lewis’s Narnia ‘fantasy’ fict­ion to new readers, but his ‘Space Trilogy’ remains largely undiscovered. The trilogy – Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945) – was completed five years before the Narnia series began. Its unlikely hero is Elwin Ransom, a Cambridge philologist and scholar of mediæval literature turned by circumstance into an existential warrior on Mars, Venus and Earth in an eschatological struggle against the forces of darkness.

Lewis claimed that he was inspired by the imaginative fiction of Olaf Stapledon, JBS Haldane, David Lindsay, HG Wells and others which discusses the fate of mankind over vast tracts of space and time. He regarded “interplanetary ideas” as a new and exciting mythology but saw it as dominated by the “desperately immoral outlook” of the “opposite side”. He came to believe in the existence of a natural, universal morality which, in the Narnia books, he called “Deep Magic”.

Although generally classed as ‘science fiction’, the trilogy is more a complex fantasy of Christ­ian themes in classical or pagan settings, heavily laced with theo­logical discussion. In them, Lewis attempts to clarify modern arguments for Christian morality that were important to him, as modern authorities generally argued from mediæval antecedents who, in turn, borr­owed from the pre-Christian world view.

Out of the Silent Planet begins with Dr Ransom kidnapped by his adversary Prof. Weston and taken to Mars in a spacecraft. Ransom escapes and meets a range of Martian beings who, he realises, also possess intelligence. He picks up their language and his mind is opened to greater matters such as what it means to be hnau (a conscious being with intelligence and a soul), and why space is not “black, cold vacuity” but the “womb of worlds” blazing with innumerable offspring. For Lewis, the sense of awe and reverence for Nature that he judges missing from heartless science is also the proper approach to the divine.

On Mars (called Malacandra in ‘Old Solar’) Ransom meets a superior race called the eldila, who are beings of subtle spiritual energy likened to angels, and a chief among them called the Oyarsa, who rules the planet. The Solar System (the Field of Arbrol) is ruled by still higher eldila, led by Malendil (known to us as Jesus). Malendil had imprisoned the Oyarsa of Earth (or Thulcandra, the ‘silent planet’) inside the Moon’s orbit after mass­acring most of Mars’s denizens. It is this ‘Bent’ Oyarsa (the Earthly Lucifer) whom Weston serves, and whose ideas of corrupted science, and the ‘right’ of the “culturally superior” to conquer other planets and exterminate “lower” life forms are shown to be spiritually bankrupt.

In the second book, Ransom is summoned to Venus (Perelandra), a watery paradise, to witness a New Adam and Eve, spoiled when Weston (now possessed by Lucifer) tempts the new Eve (Tinidril) into breaking rules imposed by Malendil. Ransom tries to prevent a recurrence of the Fall of Man in the New Eden, but Weston/Lucifer outsmarts him. In a surprising turn, God/Malendil orders Ransom to kill Weston and save the day. The final book concerns the attempt to build a new Tower of Babel on Earth (in England), which further explores the psycho­logical and spiritual gulfs between corrupted forms of science and religion and innate or natural morality.

It was necessary to lay this out (in awful brevity) to show the extent to which Lewis used fant­asy to dramatise his theses about modern morality, the lust for power, atheism, the oppression of animals and the inequality of the sexes. If some of this has a hint of familiarity, then much becomes clear when his relationship with JRR Tolkien is revealed. While both were teaching at Oxford, they used each other as sounding boards for their stories and constructed languages, and created their underlying mytho­logies based upon their shared love of mediæval language and lore. It is widely held that Lewis modelled Ransom upon Tolkien, and his eldila upon Tolkien’s First Age elves, the Valar. In that case, the base scientist Weston is Lewis’s Saruman, representing the predat­ory approach of materialistic science towards the natural world.

Most of the issues raised in the Trilogy first appeared in Lewis’s lectures, but they also surface in his mainstream writing, such as The Allegory of Love (1936), The Abolit­ion of Man (1943), Mere Christianity (1952), and in his other fiction such as The Great Divorce (1946) and the popular The Screwtape Letters (1942). As one of the most influential Christian apologists of the mid-20th century, Lewis’s works still divide theologians, philosophers and writers. One surprise in this study is that Lewis was not against the idea of Darwinian evolution, only its unimaginative interpretation; the Trilogy, as Schwartz demonstrates, explores three versions of evol­ution: the ‘mechanistic’, the ‘vital­istic’ and the ‘spiritual’. Forteans will enjoy the arguments.

Arthur C Clarke regarded this trilogy as among the few works of science fiction that should be raised to the rank of great literat­ure. Prof. Schwartz conducts a thorough dissection of the three novels, tracing their themes through Lewis’s life, his reading, friends and interests, presenting us with a better understanding of this complex, passionate scholar. Schwartz writes with great clarity, making a potentially dull subject a pleasure to read.