Not surprisingly, Weston justifies the enslavement of Ransom on utilitarian grounds. He was the sort of boy who in a civilized community would be automatically handed over to a state laboratory for experimental purposes.”Īfter his kidnapping, Ransom, as prisoner, rides in a space capsule-its actual mechanics and construction only understood by four or five of the earth’s greatest physicists-to the planet Malacandra, Mars. “The boy was ideal,” he explained in a manner anticipating Eugenics-obsessed 21st century Iceland or, then, Nazi Germany, “Incapable of serving humanity and only too likely to propagate idiocy. Originally and tellingly, Weston had wanted the local young man as hostage. Through a strange but quick succession of events involving a local, rural family and a mentally-retarded young man, Ransom finds himself the captive of his old, despised, and estranged schoolmate, Devine, and Devine’s more scientifically-minded partner, Weston.

A bachelor scholar with only a sister living in India, Ransom is on a hiking tour at the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet. Tolkien in the first two novels, Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, but with a serious amount of Charles Williams added in the third, That Hideous Strength. The Space Trilogy revolves around, mostly, the Cambridge professor-philologist, Elwin Ransom, a not-so-disguised version of J.R.R.

While a few scholars, proponents, and practitioners of science fiction have dismissed Lewis’s works as fundamental Christianity disguised as science fiction, others have correctly noted Lewis’s high style in The Space Trilogy. Lewis’s Space Trilogy, along with Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, made science fiction respectable, elevating it from what many had perceived-wrongly but sincerely-as pulpish trash to high literary art. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that C.S. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that Lewis’s “Space Trilogy” made science fiction respectable, elevating it from what many had perceived as pulpish trash to high literary art. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet” presents within the envelope of science fiction a moving story that considers the complexity of human nature and its relationship with the Creator.

Out of the silent planet lewis