Space Trilogy
The Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy is a trilogy of three science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis
The books in the trilogy are:
- Out of the Silent Planet (1938), set mostly on Mars
- Perelandra (1943), set mostly on Venus
- That Hideous Strength (1945), set on Earth. An abridged version of That Hideous Strength appeared in America by the publishing house Tor Books called The Tortured Planet, and cuts a full third of the novel out.
A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.
Lewis himself stated:
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds both of which seemed to take the idea of such [space] travel seriously and to have the desparately immoral outlook which I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read...." (From a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green).
The other main literary influence was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).[1]
The books are not especially concerned with scientific accuracy or technological speculation, and in many ways they read like fantasy adventures. Like most of Lewis's mature writing, they have a thoroughly Christian outlook and much discussion of contemporary rights and wrongs. That The Space Trilogy fuses Christian themes with science fiction in the first book is obvious and Lewis admits Wells's influence himself). Madeleine L'Engle's kairos series is also quite similar in its outlook.
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Ransom
Ransom appears very similar to Lewis himself: a university professor, expert in languages and medieval literature, unmarried (Lewis did not marry until his fifties), wounded in World War I and with no living relatives except for one sibling. Lewis, however, apparently intended for Ransom to be partially patterned after his friend and fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, since Lewis is presented as novelizing Ransom's reminiscences in the epilogue of Out of the Silent Planet and is a character-narrator in the frame tale for Perelandra.
In "Out of the Silent Planet" it is suggested that "Ransom" is not the character's real name but merely an alias for a respectable professor whose reputation might suffer from his telling a fantastic story of having been to the planet Mars.
In the following books, however, this is unaccountably dropped and it is made clear that Ransom is the character's true name. As befits a philologist, he provides an exact ethymology: the name does does not derive from the word "ransom" but rather is an contraction of the Old English name "Ranulf's Son". This is another hint to Tolkien, known for his strong affinity to the Old English languague and culture, as manifested for example in the Riders of Rohan.
Cosmology
According to the Oyarsa of Malacandra, Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol directly. But then the Bent One (the Oyarsa of Earth) rebelled against Maleldil and all the eldila of Deep Heaven. In response to this act, the Bent One suffered confinement on Earth where he first inflicted great evil. Thus he made Earth a silent planet, cut off from the Oyéresu of other planets, whence the name 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet. Maleldil tried to reach out to Thulcandra and became a man to save the human race. According to the Green Lady, Tinidril (Mother of Perelandra, or Venus), Thulcandra is favored among all the worlds.
In the Field of Arbol, the outer planets are older planets, while the inner planets are newer.
Earth will remain a silent planet until the end of the great Siege of Deep Heaven against the Oyarsa of Earth. The siege starts to end (with the Oyéresu of other worlds descending to Earth) at the finale of the Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. But there is still much further to happen until what is predicted in "The book of Revelations" when the Oyéresu come put a definite end to the rule of Satan/The Bent Eldil and on the way smash Sulva/The Moon to fragments. This, in turn, would not be "The End of the World" but merely "The Very Beginning" of what is still to come afterwards.
Eldila
The eldila (singular eldil) are a species of intelligent extraterrestrial. The human characters in the trilogy encounter them on various planets, but the eldila themselves are native to interplanetary and interstellar space ("Deep Heaven"). In standard science-fiction terms, they are "multi-dimensional energy beings." They are barely visible as faint, shifting light.
Certain very powerful eldila, the Oyéresu (singular Oyarsa), control the course of nature on each of the planets of the Solar System. They (and maybe all the eldila) can manifest in forms other than faint light.
The eldila are science-fictionalized depictions of angels, immortal and holy, with the Oyéresu perhaps being angels of a higher order (possibly in the traditional Hierarchy of angels). The eldila resident on (actually, imprisoned in) Earth are "dark eldila", fallen angels or demons. The Oyarsa of Earth is Satan. Ransom later meets the Oyéresu of both Mars and Venus, who are described as being masculine (but not actually male) and feminine (but not actually female), respectively.
Parallels with other works
The cosmology of all three books—in which the Oyéresu of Mars and Venus somewhat resemble the corresponding gods from classical mythology—derives from Lewis's interest in medieval beliefs. Central concerns of his book The Discarded Image are the way medieval authors borrowed concepts from pre-Christian religion and science and attempted to reconcile them with Christianity, and the lack of a clear distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena (or between what are now called science fiction and fantasy) in medieval thought. The Space Trilogy also expands on Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry", which argues that as long as humanity remains flawed and sinful, our exploration of other planets will tend to do them more harm than good.
Another trilogy written partly at the same time, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, has several possible parallels with the Space Trilogy. Both Perelandra and The Return of the King include a decisive final struggle in a subterranean chamber, with the adversary falling into volcanic fire, and the attitude of the scientists in That Hideous Strength toward the natural world is similar to that of Tolkien's character Saruman.
Glossopoiea/Language
According to the Space Trilogy's cosmology, the speech of all the inhabitants of the Field of Arbol is the Old Solar or Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi. Only Earth lost the language due to the Bent One's influence. Old Solar can be likened to the Elvish languages invented by Lewis's friend, Tolkien.
Glossary
Some terminology in the "Old Solar" language is used throughout the trilogy. (Words used in only one volume of the trilogy are defined in the article about that volume.)
- Field of Arbol — the Solar System
- handra — a planet or land
- Malacandra — Mars
- Perelandra — Venus
- Thulcandra — Earth, literally "The Silent Planet"
- Glund or Glundandra — Jupiter
- Viritrilbia — Mercury
- Lurga — Saturn
- Sulva — The Moon
- hnau or 'nau — a rational being, capable of speech, intellect, and personhood, and containing a soul.
Some of this terminology can be linked up with Christian concepts:
- The Old One — God the Father
- Maleldil the Younger — God the Son, or specifically Jesus (sometimes from the point of view of extraterrestrials who haven't heard that he was incarnated as a human being)
- The Third One — God the Holy Ghost
- Eldil, pl. Eldila — an Angel
- Oyarsa, pl. Oyéresu — (Title) Ruler of a planet, a higher-order angel, perhaps an arch-angel.
The Dark Tower
An unfinished manuscript, The Dark Tower — featuring Ransom and time travel — was published posthumously in 1977. (Some doubt the authenticity of the manuscript; see The Dark Tower entry.)
Sulva/The Moon - an unwritten fourth book?
There is no book in the series set on the Moon. But at several places in "That Hideous Strength", various characters give very clear descriptions of that world, which are nor really necessary for the plotline of the book and could have been deleted without altering it significantly. The descriptions show that Lewis had worked out a detailed concept of the Moon which could have been the setting of a vivid fourth book in the series. It is a reasonable assumption that he may have considered writing such a book, of which these descriptions in "That Hideous Strength" are all that remains.
Like his Mars in "Out of the Silent Planet", Lewis' concept of the The Moon (Sulva in its Old Solar name) is both influenced by and critical of H.G. Wells, in this case of The First Men in the Moon which in the previouly quoted letter Lewis considered "the best of the sort [science fiction] I have read". His Moon, like that of Wells, is a hollow world where life is mainly to be found in deep underground caverns under the near-dead surface. And as with Wells, these caverns are the home of an ancient culture whose development is indicative of the way Earth society is heading.
Lewis' Sulva is a two-headed world. Its side facing Thulcandra/Earth shares Earth's "curse" of domination by the "Bent Oyarsa" (Satan). It is controlled by a highly-advanced technological race, whose rulers achieved near-immortality, and whose members are breeding artificially, while having sex only with "cunningly made images".
They have deliberately destroyed all plant and animal life on their surface, out of a Satanically-induced hatred of life. All this is considered a good example to emulate on Earth by the evil N.I.C.E. scientist Filostrato, who is extremely well-informed about Lunar affairs.
The far side of the Moon - unseen by any human being in Lewis' time - faces Deep Heaven. There still persist air, plants and animals - wondrous "fields which would make the beholder happy" - as well as Unfallen members of the Sulvan race, still faithful to God/Maleldil. All of these are, however, the target of a war of extermination waged by the Satan-dominated faction, with fierce battles going on along the frontiers in the deep caverns and on the Far Side surface.
The Bad Guys seem fated to win eventually, with the patches of air and vegetation on the Sulvan surface growing smaller by the year - perhaps because the baddies' Satanic patron is so much nearer, or because the prohibition on the Oyeresu of other worlds to interfere applies to Sulva/Moon as well as to Thulcandra/Earth.
The eventual intervention would apparently come too late to save the good Sulvans. As revealed to Ransom at the end of Perelandra, the future events which are known on Earth as Armageddon, though actually they will be "the very beginning" of what is still to come, would involve the arrival of the Oyeresu, reinforced by the Unfallen humans of Venus/Perelandra. Their first act would be to shatter Sulva/Moon into fragments which will rain down on Earth. (As this is explicitly predicted in the Book of Revelation, Lewis could do nothing to change it).
All of this bears some resemblance to the Beleriand cycle of stories written by Lewis' friend Tolkien, whose final version appears in the Silmarillion - where elves and humans fight a heroic but foredoomed struggle with the demonic Melkor, and are being engulfed and destroyed one by one.
The Valar - like the Oyeresu, powerful beings resembling the gods of Pagan pantheons but in fact serving and totally loyal to the real monotheistic God - intervene too late to save any but a small remnant, and they find it necessary to destroy Beleriand in order to save it (Beleriand sinks beneath the waves, as Sulva is doomed to be shattered).
Perhaps Lewis came to the conclusion that a book set in such a doomed world would be too gloomy and melancholy. Or he may have come to the conclusion that it would be more effective to show the earthly would-be emulators of the evil Sulvans, at work in a familiar English background. Anyway, Ransom in "That Hideous Strength" is clearly well-informed about Sulva, as he was not in the preceding two books. But whether the knowledge comes from having been there personally or just from talking to the Oyeresu cannot be determined.
