ore than a decade before he redefined children's fantasy with the allegorical Narnia Chronicles, Oxford professor and theologist C.S. Lewis set out to redefine science fiction. A fan of what he called "mythopoeic" stories--works like those of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, more concerned with future fables than hard science--Lewis was horrified by other speculative writers who proudly proclaimed that science would lead to human dominance of the universe.
Hence the Space Trilogy, which begins in Out of the Silent Planet (1938) with a Lewis surrogate (a professor, philologist and Christian) named Ransom hauled forcibly aboard a spaceship bound for Mars, or as the natives call it, "Malacandra." One of Ransom's kidnappers simply lusts after gold, but the other has embraced a ruthlessly jingoistic credo about mankind's lofty starborne destiny. To achieve their ends, both are willing to "sacrifice" Ransom to the Martian ruler, whom they consider a witch-doctor with vivisection or worse on the agenda.
But neither man understands what Ransom, purer of motive and broader of mind, learns when he befriends the furry, poetic hrossa, speaks to the intellectual sorns, and faces their lord Oyarsa. The real nature of God and the source of the Lucifer myth are waiting on Malacandra, and the battle between these principalities will take Ransom to Venus to aid a new Eve in a new Garden of Eden against a new serpent--in Perelandra (1942)--and then back to Earth--in That Hideous Strength (1946)--to face a very mundane but much more sinister corporate threat.
You won't hear these stories in Sunday school
Lewis' Christian writings are effective in large measure because he tries to postulate rather than indoctrinate. Still, his religious ends are more obtrusive here than in the Narnia books--particularly in Perelandra, which consists of two parts rapturous description of Venus' watery ecology and three parts re-imagined conversations between Eve and the Serpent, with Ransom thrown in as the polar opposite of a devil's advocate.
The piously orthodox focus seems odd in a genre so often devoted to self-seeking secular humanism--which is of course exactly what Lewis was fighting. His morality plays mock and punish blind human ambition, demonize soulless science, and recast "space" as "heaven." But his revisionism comes with a Dickensian sense of mischief and a pragmatic, powerful lyricism.
Lewis doesn't preach--he just tells entertaining stories that happen to communicate messages effectively. His books are as full of gripping adventure as any '30s space opera (or, in the case of the earthbound Strength, as terse and realistic as any Crichton thriller). They mock arrogance and irresponsibility with sly and invasive wit.
But mostly they describe, with soaring imagination, the tastes and smells of alien worlds, and the quirks and subtle flavors of inhuman civilizations. Whether tearing through a chase scene or simply waxing poetic about a Martian landscape, Lewis is as colorful, as surprising, as challenging and as eminently readable as he was 60 years ago.
