28. C.S. Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet

I saw C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet on the shelf in the guest room at my friends Matthew and Sara’s place, and I was curious. I read the Narnia books when I was a kid, but I didn’t know Lewis wrote science fiction. It looked short enough that I could finish it before I left, and I did. Also, the story begins with the main character, Ransom, on a walking holiday that reminded me a little of Arthur Wainwright’s account of a walking tour in Yorkshire. Oh, I thought, a book about walking. But that’s not what it is.

Out of the Silent Planet sees life on other planets—Mars in particular—through Christian theology. That planet, like all the others except ours, is run by Oyarsa, a creature kind of like an archangel, who reports to a deity, Maleldil. The angels are able to move between planets, and while they can’t be seen by humans, they can be perceived. Matthew tells me that idea comes from Thomas Aquinas, which makes sense, since Lewis was a medievalist in his academic life.

Three humanoid species, or hnau, other than the angelic eldila, who can exist anywhere, live on Mars, or Malacandra, in the book: the hrossa, the séroni, and the pfifltriggi. They happily coexist, accepting, even celebrating, the differences between them, and happily accepting the rule of the Oyarsa. So other species, on other planets, accept both hierarchy (instead of democracy) and difference. That combination, for Lewis, represents a utopia.

Thulcandra, or Earth, has been influenced by a “bent” eldil, a fallen angel like Satan; the behaviour the humans, or two of them, demonstrate that influence. They are independent or non-state colonialists, partly looking for gold, partly for room for the human species to expand after making Earth uninhabitable. That’s rather prescient for a book first published in 1938. One of them, Weston, like Elon Musk, represents the expansionist position: he rejects human history, including art and culture, in favour of a kind of techno-fascism. The other, Devine, is just weak and greedy. He wants to get rich. They kidnap Ransom, a Cambridge philologist on a walking holiday, because they think Oyarsa wants a human sacrifice. He doesn’t, but they don’t know that. Oyarsa is way ahead of the humans, constantly. They don’t understand that, either. They don’t understand much. Ransom, though, because he’s curious and not exploitative, is different from the others, and the story is told from his perspective. He’s not the narrator, but the narrative stays close to what he experiences. And his language: the narrator’s vocabulary is that of an Oxford don in 1938. As Lewis was.

Out of the Silent Planet is the first in a trilogy. Will I read the other two? I doubt it. But I don’t regret reading it. Now I know what it’s like. Learning things is never a waste of time.