The Space Trilogy


The Space Trilogy or Cosmic Trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis. A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.

Contents

Summary

The books in the trilogy are:
In 1946, the publishing house Avon published a version of That Hideous Strength specially abridged by C. S. Lewis entitled The Tortured Planet.

Publication history

An unfinished manuscript published posthumously in 1977, named The Dark Tower by Walter Hooper, its editor, features Elwin Ransom in a less central role as involved with an experiment that allows its participants to view on a special screen their own location in a parallel universe. Its authenticity was impeached by Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog in her scholarly criticism of Walter Hooper, but in 2003 Alastair Fowler established its authenticity when he wrote in the Yale Review that he saw Lewis writing the manuscript that would be subsequently published as The Dark Tower, heard him reading it, and discussed it with him.

Influences and approach

Lewis stated in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green:
The other main literary influence was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus : "The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it. I had grown up on Wells's stories of that kind: it was Lindsay who first gave me the idea that the ‘scientifiction’ appeal could be combined with the ‘supernatural’ appeal."
The books are not especially concerned with technological speculation, and in many ways read like fantasy adventures combined with themes of biblical history and classical mythology. Like most of Lewis's mature writing, they contain much discussion of contemporary rights and wrongs, similar in outlook to Madeleine L'Engle's Kairos series. Many of the names in the trilogy reflect the influence of Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien's Elvish languages.

Setting

Ransom

Ransom appears very similar to Lewis himself: a university professor, expert in languages and medieval literature, unmarried, 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 That Hideous Strength Ransom, with his royal charisma and casual acceptance of the supernatural, appears more like Charles Williams.
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 recounting such a journey 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 etymology: the name does not derive from the modern word "ransom" but rather is a contraction of the Old English for "Ranolf's Son". This may be another allusion to Tolkien, a professor of Old English.

Cosmology

Ransom gets much information on cosmology from the Oyarsa of Malacandra, or Mars. Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol, or Solar System, directly. But then the Bent One 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, hence the name 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet, which is known throughout the Universe. Maleldil tried to reach out to Thulcandra and became a man to save the human race. According to the Green Lady, Tinidril, Thulcandra is favored among all the worlds, because Maleldil came to it to become a man.
In the Field of Arbol, the outer planets are older, the inner planets newer. The Asteroids are called the "dancers before the threshold of the Great Worlds."
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 at the finale of the Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. But there is still much to happen until the fulfillment of what is predicted in the Book of Revelation, when the Oyéresu put an end to the rule of the Bent Eldil and, on the way, smash the Moon to fragments. This, in turn, will not be "The End of the World", but merely "The Very Beginning" of what is still to come.

Eldila

The eldila are super-human extraterrestrials. The human characters in the trilogy encounter them on various planets, but the eldila themselves are native to interplanetary and interstellar space. They are barely visible as pillars of faint, shifting light.
Certain very powerful eldila, the Oyéresu, control the course of nature on each of the planets of the Solar System. They can manifest in corporeal forms. The title Oyarsa seems to indicate the function of leadership, regardless of the leader's species; when the Perelandran human Tor assumes rule of his world, he styles himself "Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri".
The eldila are science-fictionalised depictions of angels, immortal and holy, with the Oyéresu perhaps being angels of a higher order. The eldila resident on—actually, imprisoned in—Earth are "dark eldila", fallen angels or demons. The Oyarsa of Earth, the "Bent One", is Satan. Ransom later meets the Oyéresu of both Mars and Venus, who are described as being masculine and feminine, respectively. The Oyéresu of other worlds have characteristics like those of the corresponding Classical gods; for instance, the Oyarsa of Jupiter gives a feeling of merriment.

Hnau

Hnau is a word in the Old Solar language which refers to "rational animals" such as Humans. In the book, the Old Solar speaker specifies that God is not hnau, and is unsure whether Eldila can be termed "hnau", deciding that if they are hnau, they are a different kind of hnau than Humans or Martians.
The term was adopted by some other people, including Lewis's friend J. R. R. Tolkien, who used the term in his The Notion Club Papers - distinguishing hnau from beings of pure spirit or spirits able to assume a body. Similarly, a character in James Blish's science fiction novel A Case of Conscience wonders whether a particular alien is a hnau, which he defines as having "a rational soul".
In recent times the term has been used by some philosophers, for example in Thomas I. White's "Is a Dolphin a Person?", where he asks if Dolphins are persons, and if such, if they can also be reckoned as hnau: that is sentient beings of the same level as humans.

Old Solar 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. The grammar is little known, except for the plurals of nouns. The plurals of some words are simple, only adding a final -a or -i; others, are quite complex broken plurals, adding an internal -é-, and adding or altering a final vowel, and may also include internal metathesis. It is also referred to as "the Great Tongue":

Terms used throughout the trilogy

Other written 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. Lewis discusses these in his book The Discarded Image. Lewis was intrigued with the ways medieval authors borrowed concepts from pre-Christian religion and science and attempted to reconcile them with Christianity, and with the lack of a clear distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena in medieval thought. The Space Trilogy also plays on themes in 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. Furthermore, much of the substance of the argument between Ransom and Weston in Perelandra is found in Lewis's book Miracles. Links between Lewis's Space Trilogy and his other writings are discussed at great length in Michael Ward's Planet Narnia and in Kathryn Lindskoog's C.S. Lewis: Mere Christian.
J.R.R. Tolkien was a friend and sometime mentor to Lewis. In That Hideous Strength, Lewis alludes several times to Tolkien's Atlantean civilization Numinor, saying in the foreword “Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.” Villains in both Tolkien's Lord of the Rings cycle and here are very hostile toward the natural world.
Stephen R. Lawhead's Song of Albion trilogy contains numerous references to and parallels to the Space Trilogy. The main character is an Oxford student whose first name is Lewis. The books combine themes of Christianity and pre-Christian mythology, while the plot involves materialistic endeavors to gain access to forbidden worlds for material gain. There is also a minor villain named Weston.
John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming duology also references the Space Trilogy, with Sulva as a name for the Moon and references to fallen 'planetary angels'.
Arthur C. Clarke's three science fiction novels The Sands of Mars, Earthlight, and Islands in the Sky have been published together as The Space Trilogy, but have no connection to the works of Lewis, and are in fact only loosely connected to each other.

Popular music

Christian horror punk band Blaster the Rocket Man borrowed from The Space Trilogy in their album The Monster Who Ate Jesus. Their song "Ransom vs. The Unman" retells the struggle between Ransom and the Unman in Perelandra. "March of the Macrobes" alludes to themes in That Hideous Strength. "Tundra Time on Thulcandra" is a tribute to Out of the Silent Planet.
Becoming the Archetype produced an album titled Dichotomy inspired by The Space Trilogy.
Circle of Dust, on the album Disengage, have two instrumental tracks named Thulcandra and Perelandra. Their 2016 album Machines of Our Disgrace features a track named Malacandra.
Progressive rock band Glass Hammer have based the concept of their album Perelandra on the stories of The Space Trilogy and The Chronicles of Narnia.
Progressive hard rock band King's X titled their first album Out of the Silent Planet and included a song of the same name on their second album, Gretchen Goes to Nebraska.
Iron Maiden recorded a song called "Out of the Silent Planet" on their album Brave New World.
Hip-hop artist and singer-songwriter Heath McNease has a song titled "Perelandra" on his C.S. Lewis tribute album, The Weight of Glory.
A Christian metalcore band is named Silent Planet, after the first book of the trilogy. They currently have one full-length LP and two EPs.
Composer Kevin Braheny Fortune has a track named "Perelandra" on his album The Way Home.