I always liked this review because it reads like a diff between _That Hideous Strength_ and _1984_ (not yet written). I like the book itself as a sort of spiritual prequel. If 1984 is the dystopia realized, THS is the dystopia as it is born.
It's an interesting work. It's flawed, as Orwell notes, but it stands at the crossroads between the prewar and postwar worlds, at the very beginning, perhaps, of what we would recognize as Modernity. To the best of my knowledge, it is the last work of pre-atomic sci-fi. The work itself is as transitional as the time period.
In more concrete terms, it provides a frame on the notion of Progress, and how easily Progress (and those in charge of calling their work Progress) can turn a blind eye to the merits of what is being replaced, with contemptuous disdain for those it leaves behind. (Today we may be more likely to call this sort of thing "Disruption," and while there are real differences in the dynamic, there are similarities too.)
Finally, there's just one small piece of very good advice I extracted from an incidental note in the first chapter — if you write a letter to a committee of some sort, complaining, it will be much stronger and go over better if you limit yourself to a single complaint.
That Hideous Strength is, to me, the most challenging of his space trilogy. I liked Perelandra best, but only after reading it a second time when a friend pointed out that it was a reimagining of the garden of Eden (I was too young to pick up on that during the first read). Out of the Silent Planet is interesting since the reference is to Earth and how it remains "silent" to those outside of it who choose to avoid its rampant evil.
Incidentally the trilogy came about when C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien agreed to write separate sci-fi series - Lewis would write a space trilogy and Tolkien a time-travel one [0]. Tolkien was to write of a traveler from England who visited Numenor (the land of Aragorn's sires) before it drowned in a fate similar to Atlantis. Lewis completed his, but Tolkien did not although much of the material was published in a volume on the history of Middle Earth by his son, Christopher. (Lewis referred to his friend as "that great but dilatory and unmethodical man".) Tolkien's experiment did result in the development of the idea of the Fall of Numenor which did get incorporated into the Lord of the Rings saga.
This unfinished book was dropped in favor of "Perelandra", which I think was a good choice.
Numenor was briefly mentioned in "That Hideous Strength".
In Brazil the first two books were translated to Portuguese but, as far as I know, "Strength" never was. That was probably also a good choice as the more familiar you are with British culture the easier it is to like that book. Even for me it is my least favorite and given that I had a computer project named "Merlin" when I read it I expected to enjoy it more.
> Plenty of people in our age do entertain the monstrous dreams of power that Mr. Lewis attributes to his characters, and we are within sight of the time when such dreams will be realisable.
I love this statement. It seems quite obvious to me, as it did to him, that out of a planet of billions of people, some of those would be power hungry and organize themselves together for better carrying out their schemes. The rest of us should be vigilant in preventing them from rising in power, since they usually have little empathy for the rest of us.
It's dangerous to think of people in terms of "the rest of us" and some other group out there plotting evil, against which one must be vigilant, for it is the case that the evil is in all of us, and if you spend too much time "being vigilant" against perceived evil men, you may overlook the wickedness of your own soul.
"The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either – but right through every human heart…even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains…an uprooted small corner of evil."
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
A great quote I've carried with me a while. Still, I'd have to think even Solzhenitsyn would recommend we not let the Gulags rise again if we can help it. His description of the laws and culture that led to the Gulags are eye opening.
I've always liked this novel for its depiction of people whose justification for tyranny is "improving society", regardless of how the members of society feel about being improved.
See also Haldane's review, which is IMO more interesting. It's longer, contains plot spoilers, and Haldane has more fundamental disagreements with Lewis than Orwell does:
I find all of Lewis's works somewhat frustrating to read because I think such an obviously skilled writer should have been able to do better. Both Orwell's complaint (willingness to compromise the story for ideological ends) and Haldane's (attacks on a straw-man version of science as a result of ignorance of the real thing) are IMO correct. That said, Lewis's prose is top-notch and many of the individual scenes are great. That Hideous Strength is the best of the Space Trilogy because by that point Lewis has mostly dropped the pretense that he's writing scifi. The first two feel derivative of better scifi writers (Lewis acknowledges H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon, and I suspect David Lindsay is also an influence), whereas the last is closer to his Narnia series (although aimed at an older audience).
a straw-man version of science as a result of ignorance of the real thing
This is a no-true-Scotsman and there has been substantial scholarship of this practice as part of scientific endeavor at least since Khun’s Structure of Scientific Revolution. As Orwell notes, science had just obliterated 300,000 people quick as a flash...and so it goes. Musk tweeting a topless wired monkey head, Bezos scaling mechanical Turks, and Thiel openly seeking immortality. Silicon Valley funding transfusion of young people’s blood into the old, Crispr edited babies, and even the Tuskegee Experiment back in Lewis’s day.
Science is a human endeavor with all the vileness (and magnificence) that entails.
Tools do not exist as tools in a world without wielders. A tool is only a tool while someone is using it. “Science” does not exist as such outside its employment by human beings, it is not some Ideal floating in conceptual space. There is no science except insofar as human beings are using it for ends that human beings judge good or ill.
So it’s entirely reasonable to consider whether “science” - which I think here is really standing in for a certain kind of technological mindset - weighed in the balance, would be found wanting, whether there is not a better way of approaching the world and the things in it, including ourselves, rather than considering everything in it a sort of Heideggerian standing reserve.
This seems particularly true as we advance rather thoughtlessly toward the development of things like AI and genetic engineering.
That pretty much misses the character of human experience as humans experience it. There’s no mereness of tools in the fabric of our psychological existence. In particular abstractions on the scale of science in our conscious processes.
The “just” is how we rationalize removing half a chimp skull to sell electric cars. It’s how we excuse the inexcusable as ordinary.
I think it is you who missed a point, and don't have a sensible definition of "just" in "just a tool".
It's "just" a tool because it is not good or bad by itself, and does not even favor good or bad employment.
If you have a problem with a bad use of science, then you have a problem with a bad user of science.
By contrast, it's not like saying some deadly poison is "just a chemical" that might possibly have one or two possibly good uses but is otherwise entirely a bad thing that we could all live without if it were erased from the world.
Science is nothing but codified rationality.
There is no possible way to twist irrationality into being prefferable to rationality. And so there is no slightest trace of a valid argument that science is a problem that should be disfavored.
Yes it is in fact "just" a tool.
The human experience doesn't change this at all.
You don't need science to rationalize removing the top half of a chimpanzee skull. People who will do a thing, will do a thing with any tool. Science, religion, politics, "think of the children", plain might, anything.
To call Lewis worse than Stapledon and Lindsay is saying quite a lot, as I find both nearly unreadable. Stapledon at least had enormous ambition and unprecedented scope, though his writing reads like a poorly written encyclopedia. I have nothing good to say about Lindsay.
Wells was great, though.. both readable and imaginative. I hesitate to mention him and Lewis in the same breath, as I find absolutely nothing redeeming about Lewis' writing either, unless you like your conservative Christian propaganda laid on extra thick.
But in my recollection, the NICE organization exercises a lot of their influence through carefully placed and worded articles and editorials in newspapers and magazines. They are manipulating public perception to extend their power.
Which makes me think of “fake news” and intelligence agencies running influence campaigns through social media. Lewis’ villains I think are less meant to be “true scientists” than experts in politics and disinformation campaigns.
NICE manipulates true scientists, though I recall a NICE director bemoans their concentration of linguists and lack of philologists, another compliment to Tolkien.
The propaganda portrayal was disturbing. NICE is shown writing populist dreck for the equivalent of the Mail, and at the same time, publishing densely worded scholarly essays, to achieve the same manipulation in different groups of people. It is remarked on that the readers of the intelligent publications are further manipulated into liking the material aimed at them by the existence of the populist material, as they are eager to demonstrate their intellectual superiority by reading credulously publications they seem superior.
> When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that one does not have supernatural aid.
Lewis would have rejected the sentiment of that last sentence. For him, all of human history is part of the drama of God vs the devil. And although there has been supernatural at points in the struggle, still what humans did still mattered.
For him, a large part of the struggle is humans surrendering themselves to be used as the vessel for God’s plan.
In some sense, Merlin is a type of Mary who opens himself up to be the human body that the supernatural will inhabit, even though he knows it can ultimately destroy his body.
As an aside, this is one of my favorite books, and I would love to see it made into a movie.
The quoted sentence is - I think - a fairly modern perspective, replacing the previous "god vs devil, with humans in the middle".
You see it all the time in media - there are demons to fight, and humans fight them. Buffy, Supernatural, etc etc. The "we are god" trope is fascinatingly watchable.
It has been a while since I've read it, but the theme of the whole trilogy is human moral corruption, which of course for CS Lewis has a spiritual basis.
So I have to disagree with Orwell that the supernatural is superfluous. It's more that (each book focusing on a different planet), science is the vehicle for human moral corruption to play out on Earth.
Orwell obviously didn't find anything worthwhile in that, but I think it's more of a matter of Orwell not finding the theme compelling rather than a problem with how the book is put together.
I've read it pretty recently, but my understanding was that the whole trilogy was just a more approachable version of "Abolition of Man". I could see someone like Orwell agreeing with the problem statement in that book (moral relativity is bad) but disagreeing with the way it plays out in the novel.
I love the trilogy. Some other similar things by CS Lewis that relate are the short speech "The Inner Circle" and "The Abolition of Man". The abolition of man in particular points out the difference between the aims of classical education and modern propogandism-- and how education should create free thinking independent individuals, rather than trying to shape them to our own views or create good worker drones.
I've always quite liked this book, but the thing that really wrecks it for me is that the people on the side of evil are so chaotic they would not be able to organise a piss-up in a brewery, much less take over the world. In the real world, N.I.C.E. would rather be something like Google or Amazon.
My favorite part in a lot of ideological works is when the author clearly figures out that his hero is the bad guy by any objective standard, and is about to do a horrific thing to the antagonist.
That's the moment when, suddenly, 1) the antagonist molests a child or rapes a woman, and is killed with glee, or 2) the hero gets the upper hand on the antagonist but decides morally and bravely not to kill them, then turns their back on the antagonist for no reason; the ungrateful antagonist immediately takes the opportunity to dishonorably kill the hero from behind, but is killed by a sidekick, secondary character, or act of God in the nick of time, leaving the hero pure.
> That's the moment when, suddenly, 1) the antagonist molests a child or rapes a woman, and is killed with glee, or 2) the hero gets the upper hand on the antagonist but decides morally and bravely not to kill them, then turns their back on the antagonist for no reason; the ungrateful antagonist immediately takes the opportunity to dishonorably kill the hero from behind, but is killed by a sidekick, secondary character, or act of God in the nick of time, leaving the hero pure.
Could start that way. I think it's Thomas Covenant that works like this? An interesting contrast to the point, perhaps.
I was sorely disappointed by Lewis's Space Trilogy. The entire trilogy could be summed up as follows: "And God smote his enemies." Three books building up to a final conflict, and in the end it feels like one side wasn't even needed, since God takes care of it anyway.
To boot, his use of allegory on Perelandra was just hideous. If you're going to make an allegory, you don't have a character explain the allegory while it's in progress!
Even though both you and Orwell dislike that aspect. I think it is crucial to the books. There are many other good books without that aspect, including 1984. But a key part of the book is the hopefullness in asserting that it is not only by our own strength or insight can the evil things we see around us be overcome. A major point of the book is that evil does exist, conspiracies exist, but that good will triumph because there is something special about good. 1984 ends in a very different tone, both make good points. The variety is good.
> Even though both you and Orwell dislike that aspect. I think it is crucial to the books.
> asserting that it is not only by our own strength or insight [but by the intervention of a purportedly-benevolent supernatural being that totally isn't (barely-trying-to-be-)secrect-ly evil, we promise!] can the evil things we see around us be overcome.
The fact that it's a blatantly obvious lie is precisely why that aspect is bad. And the fact that it's crucial to the books is precisely the problem.
It appears you dislike the writing of Lewis because you disagree with his world view. Brobdingnagians appears to disagree with the world view of Orwell while still finding the exploration of that world view to be insightful.
This is precisely Orwell's objection to the end of _That Hideous Strength_, in the review which is linked.
(On the other hand, if that's literally all you took away from reading it, then you missed all of the parts which Orwell found engaging and which he ran with in _1984_.)
> In general outline, and to some extent in atmosphere, it rather resembles G. K. Chesterton’s “The Man Who Was Thursday.”:
“In his efforts to thwart the council, Syme eventually discovers that five of the other six members are also undercover detectives; each was employed just as mysteriously and assigned to defeat the Council. They soon find out they were fighting each other and not real anarchists; such was the mastermind plan of their president”
Sounds like what the war-on-terror eventually ended-up like in Northern Ireland. Eventually virtually every other terrorist of note ended up working for the security forces.
I would be interested in any background you have on this. (I know Steaknife was the worst example of this, but am interested how far it went - and as a fairly obvious corollary - what would happen if instead of "turning" terrorists they were just arrested as normal criminals mostly are. If there are lessons on the war on drugs for example.
This is not actually the part of _Thursday_ that Orwell meant by his statement. He is referring to the overall structure in which paranoia and espionage give way to an allegorical / supernatural end (which occurs after everyone heads off to chase after Sunday himself).
I have always loved the idea that the same person that wrote the Narnia stories created a dystopian neo-Arthurian fantasy involving mad scientists, lesbian Nazi police chiefs torturing Christians and interplanetary travel. There is a very good late-80s BBC Radio 4 dramatization.
Replace The Head with "AI" and I think Lewis wrote a fantastic cautionary tale. In essence, check your sources, consider your ends.
Science is a technique performed by humans to achieve some end. Humans use machines to run mechanical routines called AI to perform tasks in the world.
What are the sources of our results? What are the ends of our chosen uses and efforts?
It's an interesting work. It's flawed, as Orwell notes, but it stands at the crossroads between the prewar and postwar worlds, at the very beginning, perhaps, of what we would recognize as Modernity. To the best of my knowledge, it is the last work of pre-atomic sci-fi. The work itself is as transitional as the time period.
In more concrete terms, it provides a frame on the notion of Progress, and how easily Progress (and those in charge of calling their work Progress) can turn a blind eye to the merits of what is being replaced, with contemptuous disdain for those it leaves behind. (Today we may be more likely to call this sort of thing "Disruption," and while there are real differences in the dynamic, there are similarities too.)
Finally, there's just one small piece of very good advice I extracted from an incidental note in the first chapter — if you write a letter to a committee of some sort, complaining, it will be much stronger and go over better if you limit yourself to a single complaint.