Reading For Our Times

     While many people have read and enjoyed the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, his "Space Travel Trilogy" is less well known.

     The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is, at first sight, a straightforward space adventure of its day: our hero stumbles into a secretive mission departing for the planet Mars and is abducted.  Arriving at Mars, he and his captors are separated, have various adventures and are reunited.  --But all is not as it seems.  Like the Narnia books, there is considerable Christian allegory at work.  It's entertaining fiction, and is probably the most widely read book of the trilogy.

     The next two are...different.  Perelandra is a fairly overt struggle between Good and Evil, in which Lewis treats in some detail the banality and pettiness of evil.  I was reminded of it when I read Adam Serwer's 2018 essay "The Cruelty is the Point" in The Atlantic.  While C. S. Lewis devotes considerably more wordage to the topic and addresses it within an explicitly Christian context, the parallels are indeed striking. Professor Weston, the villain of both Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, has many counterparts in current politics, willing and even eager to commit cruelties both great and small, allegedly for the greater good but in fact, largely for their own sake, artifacts of a corroded soul.

     The third book, That Hideous Strength, is a cautionary tale and one the years have brought into ever sharper outline.  Combining elements of Arthurian legend with the mythos established by the preceding two books, it investigates both the risks of reducing of the human experience to a series of algorithms and the perils of AI simulating human behavior.  You do not need to share the religious spin Lewis gives these themes to follow along -- and the entire story is set within the exciting tales of a young academic who is drawn into and the ultimately rejects the machinations of the antagonists.  I won't spoil too story with too many details, but it's well worth the read, full of tension and excitement.

     Lewis saw trends well in advance of his time.  He filtered his impressions through his own education and religious beliefs, but his unwavering belief in the value of the dignity of the human soul shines through his work in a way impossible to ignore.

     Those three books offer a perspective sorely lacking at present.