Besides The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis' best-known fiction is his science-fiction works known as The Space Trilogy. Also known as The Cosmic Trilogy, perhaps because the third volume is notably "earthbound", these three books have been jokingly referred to as "Narnia in space".
At the time that Lewis wrote these works, there was debate about whether there was life beyond the stars, about the limits of science, and about whether new discoveries would finally "throw off the shackles" of religion. Add into the mix were concerns about social Darwinism, eugenics, imperialism, and so on, and the intellectual debates were fascinating, but they obviously must have troubled Lewis because they all were going towards what he would have concluded was the wrong direction. So Lewis set out his pen, and began to put forth his view of what life may be like beyond the cosmos if aliens existed. Along the way, he dealt with issues such as the importance of life, even if the person is not as intelligent, or doesn't seem to be as worth-while to society, as well as the idea that the ends decidedly do not justify the means in all circumstances. Indeed, Lewis' portrayal of the evil plots by Weston and Devine seem to be a very subtle jab against Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia who (especially Hitler) still seemed to have a puzzling popularity in the West.
The story starts out with a professor of philology (who seems to have been based upon Lewis' good friend, The Lord of the Rings author, J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a scholar of languages) who is on his break from school, and is using the time away from researching, teaching and grading papers to go on a "walking tour" of the English countryside.
Seeking shelter for the night in a small village, the professor, Dr. Elwin Ransom, comes across a hysterical woman distraught over the fact that her mentally handicapped son hasn't come home from work on time that day, like he always does. Though he really just wants to find a place to spend the night as soon as possible, Ransom agrees to search for and find her boy, and he does so. He comes upon a scene of the young man, scared out of his mind, being roughed up by two other men. Upon rescuing the boy, Ransom finds himself soon kidnapped by the villains, Professor Weston and Devine, Who quickly drug him into unconsciousness.
He is stunned upon waking to find himself on a spaceship journeying to a strange planet his captors call "Malacandra". He soon learns that they intend to give him as a human sacrifice to the natives of the planet, called "sorns". As soon as the ship lands, Ransom takes advantage of a distraction to run off and evade his (now former) captors. As he makes his way across the landscape of the strange, new world, he learns that all is not as it appears. His eventual fate is not nearly as bad as Weston and Devine thought it would be, but the secrets he learns about his own world will change him forever.
This work is truly a masterpiece. Lewis opined on the philosophical and moral debates of his time by use of the story-telling device of science-fiction. Arguably, the credit that folks give to Gene Roddenberry for ushering in some new era of storytelling by using his Star Trek stories to give commentary on current events issues should go instead to C. S. Lewis. Lewis was able to effectively use his typically elegant and witty prose to the extent that his commentary did not interfere at all with the tale he wanted to tell. In most authors, the "lessons" or "Aesops" come across in a blunt, clumsy, heavy-handed manner. Not so in this work.
I really just want to deal with a two main criticisms that the book and series as a whole have gotten. First, Lewis did not have some hair-brained notion of Mars landscape. He knew, because it was already known to some extent, that Mars was not like this. It is a STORY. He was making up a fiction, just like DC Comics does with the Martian Manhunter, or many others have. The second major criticism is that Lewis hated science. No, he didn't. Ransom was a philologist, which is one of the "harder" areas of the "social sciences", the sorns are basically scholars and scientists, and the atheist good guy among the group in the final installment of the trilogy, is an intelligent, scientific man. No, what Lewis hated and criticized was science unrestrained by notions of basic morality and decency. That really is different from "hating science".
The Cosmic Trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, is still to this day unique among science-fiction tales, because the aliens that are superior to humans are not so due to atheism, but due to a higher moral state and a belief in God, the God that is known as the Judeo-Christian God here on earth.
This book and the rest of the trilogy, like the Narnia books, is enjoyable as a fun story, but for those who wish to "dig deeper", the commentary Lewis put forth in the books was pertinent to the time in which it was written, and is still relevant today.
Highly Recommended.
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Out of the Silent Planet: Ransom Trilogy, Book 1
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Annis Ben Daoud
une édition harper collins, mais imprimée en france!
Reviewed in France on July 13, 2023
