Book Club: Out of the Silent Planet
C. S. Lewis was a fan of science fiction
As a young boy, Lewis read the works of Jules Verne (Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea) and H. G. Wells (The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds, The Island of Dr. Moreau, and The First Men in the Moon). He was also familiar with the sci-fi stories appearing in the pages of the enormously popular American pulp science fiction magazines.
From his essay “On Science Fiction” and from his some of his published correspondence, we know that he read A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott.
Lewis also read the novels of fellow British author Olaf Stapledon, in particular his 1930 novel Last and First Men, a “future history” of humanity’s evolution. Stapledon was not prolific, but his relatively few published works were hugely influential on future SF authors: Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem…
…and C.S. Lewis. He was directly influenced by Stapledon, but not because he liked it. He admired Stapledon’s writing, but was actually repelled by what he viewed as the immorality of what went on in the stories. In particular, Lewis objected strongly to the idea of mankind escaping his own planet (after wearing it out, or exploiting it to the point that it became uninhabitable) and going out to take over other planets, committing genocide on other planets in order to colonize them. This happens in Last and First Men – the humans travel to the planet Venus and wipe out the intelligent sentient beings they find there, then colonize it themselves.
Lewis was not a fan of science fiction’s popular tropes
C.S. Lewis wrote his space trilogy in part as a response to what he objected to in Stapledon’s works. When it became clear that xenophobia and galactic imperialism were to become common themes in then-contemporary science fiction, he remarked to his friend, J. R. R. Tolkien, “You know, Tollers, they don’t write the kind of stories we like. I suppose we’ll have to write them ourselves.”
And so they did. Sadly, Tolkien’s foray into science fiction—a time travel story—never interested his publisher enough to print it. But Lewis’s short novel, Out of the Silent Planet, was published in 1938 and remains a beloved classic to this day. It contains elements in direct contradiction to what Stapledon’s novels extolled: the characters who advocate wholesale genocide of a planet’s inhabitants to make room for humanity are definitely the villains of the story. Other targets of Lewis’s incisive narrative critique include the myth of progress, “chronological snobbery,” scientism, and racial triumphalism.
Innovative vision of outer space
In 1938, when Out of the Silent Planet was published, humankind had flown in the air but had not yet been to space. Lewis’s personal and scholarly interest in the medieval era shines forth in his beautiful descriptions of what it was like to escape the gravitational pull and the darkside shadows of Earth. To Lewis, it’s not Space—black, empty and lifeless—but The Heavens—flooded with light, drenched with color and teeming with life. Why? Because, he surmised, once a craft broke free of the Earth’s atmosphere and its shadow, it was free to enjoy the everlasting light of the Sun. The fact that Lewis turned out to be technically incorrect about this in no way diminishes the joy of his lively vision.
We didn’t get to it in our podcast, but let me share Lewis’s vision of what it might be like to be on the surface of Mars as twilight faded to night:
Imagine the Milky Way magnified—the Milky Way seen through our largest telescope on the clearest night. And then imagine this, not painted across the zenith, but rising like a constellation behind the mountain-tops—a dazzling necklace of lights brilliant as planets, slowly heaving itself up till it fills a fifth of the sky and now leaves a belt of blackness between itself and the horizon. It is too bright to look at for long, but it is only a preparation. Something else is coming.
There is a glow like moonrise on the harandra.
“Ahihra!” cries Hyoi, and other baying voices answer him from the darkness all about us.
And now the true king of night is set up, and now he is threading his way through that strange western galaxy and making its lights dim by comparison with his own. I turn my eyes away, for the little disk is far brighter than the Moon in her greatest splendour. The whole handramit is bathed in colorless light; I could count the stems of the forest on the far side of the lake; I see that my fingernails are broken and dirty. And now I guess what it is that I have seen—Jupiter rising beyond the Asteroids and forty million miles nearer that he has ever been to earthly eyes.
Delightful Martian anthropology
As a world-building project, Out of the Silent Planet is mind-boggling. In a mere 160 pages, Lewis managed to create not just one, but three fascinating sentient extraterrestrial species and their respective unique cultures, a truly alien landscape and topography, and a planetary history so vast that the Martian creatures have technology indistinguishable from magic.
Plus there are angels. In Lewis’s capable authorial hands they are suitably strange, otherworldly, incomprehensible and ineffable—and they utter some of the funniest lines in the book.
If you’d like to pick up your own copies of Out of the Silent Planet and the other books we mentioned, do check out Clare’s Bookshop.org page. Scroll down to the Splanchnics Book Club section, the C. S. Lewis section, or the Science Fiction & Fantasy section.
Clare is an independent author who would be honored if you checked out her books! If you like exciting thrillers featuring an “everyman” hero who rises to his or her full potential in the face of peril, you will love The Keys of Death. It’s a veterinary medical thriller about a small-town animal doctor who gets tangled up in a whistle-blowing scheme against a big biotech company. Or, if you prefer shorter fiction, try Startling Figures, a collection of three paranormal urban fantasy stories.
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Image credits: Cover illustration for Out of the Silent Planet by Kinuko Y. Craft for the 1986 paperback edition, Macmillan Publishing Company.