Out of the Silent Planet
I read CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy in reverse order this year. That Hideous Strength has long been my favorite and I usually turn to it first when I’m in the mood for a solid, enjoyable, and strengthening reading experience. Then, once I’ve enjoyed it, I often go back and reread the first two books of the series.
Every time I read them though, I’m struck anew by how richly Lewis’s learning and his religion informed his fiction. On every page the Christian is challenged to set aside pettiness, to reject convienent and minor immorality and to stand for the slightest shred of honor and justice. Lewis’s characters sometimes seem to be tilting at windmills, but it always turns out that those windmills were the clever disguises of genuinely dark and evil giants, and that however ineffectual the actual tilting may have been, the obedience it embodied brings about righteousness.
My understanding is that Out of the Silent Planet was groundbreaking work for Science Fiction when it was written because Lewis was one of the (if not the) first to imagine an alien people being juster, kinder and wiser than humanity. I highly recommend reading the whole series again and again. These books never wear thin.
May 18th, 2009 at 6:43 am
I wrote a song about Out of the Silent Planet. It is all folky and nice. Wish you could hear it.