C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy Offers Thoughtful Adventure

Fans of this year's Prince Caspian, its predecessor The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, or the seven-book Chronicles of Narnia from which both were drawn would be well served to track down a copy of the same author's Space Trilogy, published either in one edition or seperately as Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Although devoid of talking lions or any mention of Narnia (instead acknowledging a debt to H.G. Wells and other pioneers of science fiction and tying itself, fleetingly but tantalizingly, to the future history of Tolkien's Middle Earth), the trilogy offers everything that made the Chronicles great, this time in a different genre -- science fiction -- and with a different audience. For although the author refers to the story as a "fairy tale", it is clear from his frank discussions of morality, theology, sexuality, and political mechanations that this is a fairy tale for grown-ups, and an impassioned argument that good and evil are neither outdated nor naive, but rather very real forces that act around and through each of us.

All three books feature a major, although not always central, character named Ransom. Although he eventually evolves into an unabashed Hero, untouchable and unknowable in his perfection and goodness, he begins as the archetypical reluctant hero, with small 'h': unwillingly pulled into dire circumstances and intially motivated primarily by self-preservation. He serves for much of the series as the eyes through which we view the action, although Lewis' most effective trick is to periodically switch focuses to a less-than-savory character. Ransom's unflinching dedication to the pure and the good carries over, and we feel a sense of disgust and defilement as we are forced to experience the world through the eyes of someone either dedicated to, or enthralled by, evil or even indifference. For a central theme of Lewis' work is that evil-doers are fundamentally stupid, having subscribed to a premise so faulty that it leads them to painfully irrational conclusions. An evil man does not believe in goodness, so he cannot distinguish between a hero and a foe. Thus he may treat the one like the other, with disastrous consequences. The good man does not suffer from this fault, rather acknowledging the presense of evil in the world and his own compulsion to oppose it. Nevertheless, the fight is not one-sided, for in his ignorance the evil man frequently endangers his own fortunes as well as those of others. The plight of good becomes a struggle to save the world from itself.

Another of Lewis' talents is world creation. The three planets on which the action plays out do not come across as soundstage sets of limited width and depth. Rather, Lewis makes a substantial effort to flesh out the geography, biology, political and economic structures, and even alternate moralities for each world (not just different taboos and totems, but different methods for evaluating right and wrong). When he offers a new language he presents not only vocabulary, but conjugations and declensions, etymons and cognates, and rules of elided consonants. (Despite how this sounds, this never becomes tedious, for he obeys the cardinal rule of never introducing an alien world into the lexicon when an English word would serve just as well. Like Heinlein's grok and Adam's frith, his neologisms become essential parts of lexicon) One gets the sense, as in Nivea, that each world is far larger and more complicated than the limited part that we are able to explore in a few hundred pages.

Aspects of the series are somewhat dated, although ironically this may be used to argue that they are increasingly relevant. Hard sci-fi fans will squirm at the idea of gravity in a spacecraft pointing toward whatever planet one is closest to, or the fact that one travels between planets in straight lines at constant velocity, as if by rail. Likewise a breathable atmosphere on Venus and Mars, the unbearable heat in the "eternal droon" of space, and aliens, that for all their authentically alien societies and thought processes, are too-frequently portrayed as minor variations on Earth-bound species (although Lewis' Christian premise that they, like us, were created in the Maker's image is partly responsible for this tendency.) But Lewis' apparent idealism, his premise that the world is black and white --- or at least that all those who find themselves enmeshed in shades of grey would be better off rejecting them and embracing the white -- was conceived in the shadow of Blitz and Dachau and Hiroshima. In the face of those who would call his idealism or his religion outdated, he would certainly write no differently today.