What a throwback! The space trilogy was deeply important to me as a teen. I'm glad you picked the second book to focus on, because it was also the one that stuck with me most.
I think the 2nd book is probably my least favorite! But it was the one I ended up writing about for whatever reason...
overall the first one is probably the strongest (imo) but my favorite is probably the inconsistent third one, because, while the bad parts are pretty bad, the better parts are amazing.
I still Haven't read that trilogy! The only books of his I read outside of the chronicles of Narnia or the Screwtape letters and the Great Divorce. The great divorce would actually make a good twilight zone episode.!
Excellent. C. S. Lewis's space trilogy is a powerful humanist work of literature. We're all insignificant, like the sparrow that falls from the sky. But we matter. Thank you for writing about it. I will now re-read the trilogy and dive into your old essay too. Thanks again.
I read Lewis's OUTER SPACE Trilogy when I was a teenager, and it never stuck with me like *The Screwtape Letters* did. To be honest, *That Hideous Strength* baffled me, maybe because I wasn't anti-science like it seemed Lewis was in that book—a term that, these days, takes on an UGLY new meaning.
While I'm sure C.S. Lewis never intended his Humanist opposition to Science! to lead to the hateful, rabidly anti-science agenda of the Religious Right, that's...what it kind of did, I'm afraid.
Lewis isn't anti science I don't think; that's certainly not the main thrust of That Hideous Strength. the main target of That Hideous Strength is administrative systems which abandon ethics in favor of in group power.
You may very well be right, Noah—now that you say it, I remember reading something in the last few years about *That Hideous Strength* being read as an anti-communist tract, though it's more broadly anti-bureaucratic at the expense of all else.
I just didn't take it that way when I read the trilogy as a teenager, possibly because the only bureaucracy I knew was school, and I was still young enough to respect the institution and not question what it was doing to me.
Godless Communism is all rational and bureaucratic, unlike Good Christians! 🙄 It was very much part and parcel with what I was being taught growing up as a Protestant—and if it has a slight whiff of antisemitism? That was (an unspoken) part of it, too....
I would imagine that teenaged me, growing up in the late 1960s-early 1970s, would have completely missed the anti-feminist, homophobic, and anti-abortion aspects of the book.
People who think that sci fi isn’t serious literature are really missing out.
What a throwback! The space trilogy was deeply important to me as a teen. I'm glad you picked the second book to focus on, because it was also the one that stuck with me most.
I think the 2nd book is probably my least favorite! But it was the one I ended up writing about for whatever reason...
overall the first one is probably the strongest (imo) but my favorite is probably the inconsistent third one, because, while the bad parts are pretty bad, the better parts are amazing.
well that's interesting! it's been so long i barely remember the first, and only snippets of the third. might be time to revisit some old haunts...
I still Haven't read that trilogy! The only books of his I read outside of the chronicles of Narnia or the Screwtape letters and the Great Divorce. The great divorce would actually make a good twilight zone episode.!
Excellent. C. S. Lewis's space trilogy is a powerful humanist work of literature. We're all insignificant, like the sparrow that falls from the sky. But we matter. Thank you for writing about it. I will now re-read the trilogy and dive into your old essay too. Thanks again.
wonderful thank you
I read Lewis's OUTER SPACE Trilogy when I was a teenager, and it never stuck with me like *The Screwtape Letters* did. To be honest, *That Hideous Strength* baffled me, maybe because I wasn't anti-science like it seemed Lewis was in that book—a term that, these days, takes on an UGLY new meaning.
While I'm sure C.S. Lewis never intended his Humanist opposition to Science! to lead to the hateful, rabidly anti-science agenda of the Religious Right, that's...what it kind of did, I'm afraid.
Lewis isn't anti science I don't think; that's certainly not the main thrust of That Hideous Strength. the main target of That Hideous Strength is administrative systems which abandon ethics in favor of in group power.
You may very well be right, Noah—now that you say it, I remember reading something in the last few years about *That Hideous Strength* being read as an anti-communist tract, though it's more broadly anti-bureaucratic at the expense of all else.
I just didn't take it that way when I read the trilogy as a teenager, possibly because the only bureaucracy I knew was school, and I was still young enough to respect the institution and not question what it was doing to me.
I don't really remember anti Communist per se—it's very anti feminist and grossly homophobic, unfortunately. Anti abortion too.
Godless Communism is all rational and bureaucratic, unlike Good Christians! 🙄 It was very much part and parcel with what I was being taught growing up as a Protestant—and if it has a slight whiff of antisemitism? That was (an unspoken) part of it, too....
I would imagine that teenaged me, growing up in the late 1960s-early 1970s, would have completely missed the anti-feminist, homophobic, and anti-abortion aspects of the book.