100 One-Night Reads by David C. Major

Author:David C. Major [Major, David C.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48089-7
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-01-14T16:00:00+00:00

C. S. LEWIS

Out of the Silent Planet

Clive Staples Lewis was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, of a privileged background, and spent his entire adult life in the rarified world of England's elite universities. He graduated from Oxford and taught there for almost thirty years (and was a colleague and close friend of J. R. R. Tolkien; see p. 272). Then he moved on to Cambridge, where he taught for another ten years, until his death. He was a respected scholar and teacher of medieval and Renaissance literature but was best known to the public as a deeply committed Christian layman who spoke and wrote eloquently in the service of his faith.

Many readers will know Lewis as the author of the seven novels of The Chronicles of Narnia (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and six sequels), greatly beloved by children who are fortunate enough to encounter them just as they are learning to be independent readers. However, he is probably best remembered for his moving and brilliantly written works of Christian apologetics (arguments for the validity of Christian faith), especially Mere Christianity and The Screwtape Letters. His Space Trilogy (Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength) is less well known today, but it remains a pioneering work of science fiction; all three of its parts are very satisfying to read.

Out of the Silent Planet begins with Professor Ransom on a walking holiday in a remote part of England. He soon finds himself kidnapped and taken aboard a spacecraft on its way to an unknown destination. The craft is a joint enterprise of Weston and Devine, two men who, in the small world of the British intelligentsia, are actually known to Ransom. This unsavory pair, we learn, are returning to the planet Malacandra (the one we know as Mars) with Ransom as a required item of cargo; an influential group of the planet's inhabitants, the Sorns, have refused to have anything to do with Weston and Devine until the two men have supplied them with a specimen Earth-dweller for examination. Weston and Devine are a frightening and ill-assorted pair, the former a sort of fascist idealist looking for new worlds into which humans can expand, the latter interested only in the mineral wealth of Malacandra. Ransom, fearing both of them, assumes that the Sorns want him as a human sacrifice, or worse, and escapes shortly after the spacecraft touches down again. Eluding his fellow humans, he begins to wander in Malacandra's weirdly beautiful landscapes.

Luckily, he falls in with a group of the local inhabitants, who treat him very kindly. They are, he learns, not Sorns, but Hrossa, large, amiable creatures (think of them as resembling the Cookie Monster from Sesame Street) who live by farming and fishing and are devoted to poetry and music. Ransom soon learns that the Hrossa are only one of several populations of intelligent beings on Malacandra. There are Sorns indeed, but they are not fearsome; rather, they are the planet's philosophers and

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