A Certain Slant of Light

littlerhymes and I have dived into the next phase of our C. S. Lewis project: the Space Trilogy! Unlike Narnia, I’ve never read these books before, which may be just as well, as I’m not sure I would have enjoyed Out of the Silent Planet when I was doing my first Narnia read as a teen. Maybe! I did enjoy it now. But it is definitely way less plotty than Narnia, focused on worldbuilding almost to the exclusion of everything else.

Some background: as per Humphrey Carpenter, this trilogy came about when Lewis comment to Tolkien that there just weren’t enough of the kind of books they liked, so they had better write some. Lewis would write about space travel - characteristically, he cranked out a trilogy - and Tolkien would write about time travel. Also characteristically, he never finished his, even though this first book ends with a nudge: if there’s going to be more space travel, there’ll have to be some time travel!

Also per Humphey Carpenter, Space Trilogy hero Ransom was based on Tolkien, which certainly makes the two chapters that Ransom spends buck naked on a spaceship feel a little awkward. (Why is he naked, you ask? Because space is hot, because there is no atmosphere to shield you from the sun’s heat.)

Anyway! Ransom, a university philologist on his summer break, was out on a nice summer walking tour when he got kidnapped by his old schoolmate Devine and Devine’s mad scientist friend Weston, who bundle him onto a spaceship for the express purpose of handing him over to the locals as a human sacrifice once they reach Malacandra.

However, on Malacandra, Ransom escapes! And thus begin his picaresque wanderings through Malacandra, during which he meets the three sentient species of the planet, beginning with the hross, otter-like creatures who, Ransom is stunned to realize, have a language. There’s an amazing sequence where he starts gleefully going into the philology of it all.

This sequence is quite short, unfortunately, and in the postscript - supposedly Ransom’s critique of the manuscript, and I would bet money that Lewis is at very least drawing heavily on Tolkien’s critiques - Ransom complains that there ought to be way more philological detail. This of course will vary from reader to reader, but I certainly would have enjoyed more!

Much of the book is about Ransom trying to figure out the social structure of Malacandra, and really struggling for quite some time because of all his imported earth ideas. For instance, he’s convinced that one of the species must be ruling the other two: they can’t just all be getting along, can they? But they are, in part because they are ruled by a figure called Oyarsa, who is something like an angel, not least in the fact that Earth’s Oyarsa long ago fell from grace, which has left Earth a Silent Planet.

I have heard that Perelandra is the one where we really get the full brunt of Lewis’s gender politics - perhaps inevitably, given that it’s set on Venus? Although Malacandra is Mars, and the whole point of the worldbuilding is that on Mars there are no wars… Well, anyway, we shall see! Always an adventure with Lewis.