Out of the Silent Planet (1) (The Space Trilogy) Paperback – March 11, 2003

Love this book and series. So thought provoking and C.S. Lewis really does take the reader on such an incredible journey! Love how it whisked me away into another world as I read, and yet left me pondering the nuances of some real-life issues and topics at the same time. Highly recommend giving this series a shot!

Besides The Chronicles of Narnia, C. S. Lewis' best-known fiction is his science-fiction works known as The Space Trilogy. Also known as The Cosmic Trilogy, perhaps because the third volume is notably "earthbound", these three books have been jokingly referred to as "Narnia in space".At the time that Lewis wrote these works, there was debate about whether there was life beyond the stars, about the limits of science, and about whether new discoveries would finally "throw off the shackles" of religion. Add into the mix were concerns about social Darwinism, eugenics, imperialism, and so on, and the intellectual debates were fascinating, but they obviously must have troubled Lewis because they all were going towards what he would have concluded was the wrong direction. So Lewis set out his pen, and began to put forth his view of what life may be like beyond the cosmos if aliens existed. Along the way, he dealt with issues such as the importance of life, even if the person is not as intelligent, or doesn't seem to be as worth-while to society, as well as the idea that the ends decidedly do not justify the means in all circumstances. Indeed, Lewis' portrayal of the evil plots by Weston and Devine seem to be a very subtle jab against Hitler in Germany and Stalin in Russia who (especially Hitler) still seemed to have a puzzling popularity in the West.The story starts out with a professor of philology (who seems to have been based upon Lewis' good friend, The Lord of the Rings author, J. R. R. Tolkien, himself a scholar of languages) who is on his break from school, and is using the time away from researching, teaching and grading papers to go on a "walking tour" of the English countryside.Seeking shelter for the night in a small village, the professor, Dr. Elwin Ransom, comes across a hysterical woman distraught over the fact that her mentally handicapped son hasn't come home from work on time that day, like he always does. Though he really just wants to find a place to spend the night as soon as possible, Ransom agrees to search for and find her boy, and he does so. He comes upon a scene of the young man, scared out of his mind, being roughed up by two other men. Upon rescuing the boy, Ransom finds himself soon kidnapped by the villains, Professor Weston and Devine, Who quickly drug him into unconsciousness.He is stunned upon waking to find himself on a spaceship journeying to a strange planet his captors call "Malacandra". He soon learns that they intend to give him as a human sacrifice to the natives of the planet, called "sorns". As soon as the ship lands, Ransom takes advantage of a distraction to run off and evade his (now former) captors. As he makes his way across the landscape of the strange, new world, he learns that all is not as it appears. His eventual fate is not nearly as bad as Weston and Devine thought it would be, but the secrets he learns about his own world will change him forever.This work is truly a masterpiece. Lewis opined on the philosophical and moral debates of his time by use of the story-telling device of science-fiction. Arguably, the credit that folks give to Gene Roddenberry for ushering in some new era of storytelling by using his Star Trek stories to give commentary on current events issues should go instead to C. S. Lewis. Lewis was able to effectively use his typically elegant and witty prose to the extent that his commentary did not interfere at all with the tale he wanted to tell. In most authors, the "lessons" or "Aesops" come across in a blunt, clumsy, heavy-handed manner. Not so in this work.I really just want to deal with a two main criticisms that the book and series as a whole have gotten. First, Lewis did not have some hair-brained notion of Mars landscape. He knew, because it was already known to some extent, that Mars was not like this. It is a STORY. He was making up a fiction, just like DC Comics does with the Martian Manhunter, or many others have. The second major criticism is that Lewis hated science. No, he didn't. Ransom was a philologist, which is one of the "harder" areas of the "social sciences", the sorns are basically scholars and scientists, and the atheist good guy among the group in the final installment of the trilogy, is an intelligent, scientific man. No, what Lewis hated and criticized was science unrestrained by notions of basic morality and decency. That really is different from "hating science".The Cosmic Trilogy, beginning with Out of the Silent Planet, is still to this day unique among science-fiction tales, because the aliens that are superior to humans are not so due to atheism, but due to a higher moral state and a belief in God, the God that is known as the Judeo-Christian God here on earth.This book and the rest of the trilogy, like the Narnia books, is enjoyable as a fun story, but for those who wish to "dig deeper", the commentary Lewis put forth in the books was pertinent to the time in which it was written, and is still relevant today.Highly Recommended.

I enjoyed this book. It takes a little bit of brainpower to process some of it, so not something you read in one night (unlike the Narnia books, which you can get through in a couple of hours).I get the picture that Lewis, as sort of a Classics guy, got frustrated with some of the Moderns - I wonder if the character of Weston is a composite of some of the science faculty at Oxford. The sort (and this isn't strictly "science", but an attitude about science) that would consider things like art, philosophy, & literature a whole bunch of made-up nonsense, whereas science is based on Truth, and thus scientists should be in charge.Lewis (in this as well as other works) likes to take a step back and get the reader to consider some of the unstated assumptions that shape the Modern world view, things that are so deep within the modern psyche that we are not generally conscious of them. In this respect, sometimes Lewis sounds a bit dated, because some of the Modern thought that was prevalent in his era (and so apparently irritating to him) has faded in favor of post-modernism (whatever that means). For example, Weston's speech (which Ransom translates rather hilariously) reflects a more colonial period and worldview, which at one time was quite prevalent, and Lewis would be at least a little bit controversial in mocking it. But now in our post-colonial, politically correct, diversity-conscious age, we are all conditioned to see the inherent wrongness of Weston's interplanetary cultural imperialism. Lewis himself is writing somewhere in the transitional period between Modernism and "post-modernism", so to some extent he is already beating a dead horse, but not completely - some parts of Modern thought have been quite thoroughly subsumed into the contemporary period.I thought the science fiction & fantasy elements of this story were surprisingly well done, given that Lewis himself was not a scientist, but he seemed to be at least somewhat up on things like gravity and orbital mechanics, even if there's not a lot of technical detail. What I liked was this notion that Ransom is reflexively fearful of the aliens - in his mind, before he ever meets them, he imagines they must be both super-intelligent and super-malevolent. And indeed, this is something deeply ingrained in us, whether it is from stories & movies we see from a very young age (E.T. & Close Encounters of the Third Kind not withstanding!), or something else that recoils at the notion of an intelligence which is not human. So imagine the surprise when it turns out that the aliens are all decidedly non-evil, and quite happy and gentle. The book is not quite so allegorical as the Narnia books, but the implication is clearly that the Malacandran races are not "fallen". Borrowing from some of Lewis's other works as well, this would mean that they act according to their nature; it is Man who is the abberation among rational creatures in doing evil, by acting against his own nature, and against his own interest (all the while thinking he his seeking his own interest). And thus it is perhaps a uniquely human trait to fear and expect evil from the non-human.Lewis did put some effort into creating some language & grammar for his Malacandrans. I wonder if he was trying to show Tolkien that he could play at that game too, but it does come across as just that - Lewis is just playing at making up a language & grammar for the sake of his story, whereas for Tolkien it's almost like creating the language & the grammar leads naturally to the stories. Although Lewis's writing is erudite, it lacks the "epic" and "classical" feel of Tolkien. Lewis is more conversational and chummy. There is a fairly long section at the end - Ransom, Weston, and Devine's audience with Osarya - in which we get a lot of speech that is English translated into Malacandran, or Malacandran back into English. Now some of this does come across as quite funny, mostly at Weston's expense. But since the conceit is that Ransom himself is not at all fluent, it comes across like a kindergarten reading book with simple, awkward sentences. And it gets pretty old, since they are talking about some fairly deep stuff. Although maybe Lewis is making a meta-point there, that for many of us our language skills (and even our very thought processes) are quite primitive when it comes to deeper questions of morality and philosophy. No argument could convince Weston of his wrongness because that part of his brain that is meant to understand such things is stunted.There was a little bit of weirdness at the end, where we switch from the main third-person narrative, to the author's (i.e. Lewis's) point of view, where he describes how he heard the story from Ransom, with excerpts from correspondence, etc. I think the point is to try to bring the story more into the "real world" (while also maintaining the sense that it sounds, and perhaps really is, delusional). However, I thought it detracted a bit - left me feeling less immersed.

Enjoyed thinking about eternal life and heavens beyond the experience of man and earth. More than just science fiction. A story that makes you ponder our existence.