C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: That Hideous Strength (part 1)

The title is taken from a line by the 16th Century poet Sir David Lyndsay (no relation, as far as I know, to the author of A Voyage to Arcturus):

The shadow of that hyddeous strength
Sax myle and more it is of length.

The  word “strength” here is used in its original meaning of a stronghold or a fortress and refers to the Tower of Babel, that dreadful monument to pride which according to some traditions was the citadel of the first world-conquering despot.

Each of the volumes of C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy is its own animal; each written in a different style and evoking a different theme. Out of the Silent Planet was an admitted and unashamed pastiche of the scientific romances of H.G. Wells. Perelandra, on the other hand, drew it’s inspiration from medieval fantasies. Lewis’s third book, That Hideous Strength, is literally more down-to-earth, set in the most mundane location imaginable: a small university town.

Which is why Lewis subtitles his book “A Modern Fairy-Tale.”

If you ask why – intending to write about magicians, devils, pantomime animals, and planetary angels – I nevertheless begin with such hum-drum scenes and persons, I reply that I am following the traditional fairy-tale. We do not always notice its method, because the cottages, castles, woodcutters and petty kings with which a fairy tale opens have become for us as remote as the witches and ogres to which it proceeds. But they were not remote at all to the men who made and first enjoyed the stories.

But Lewis’s real inspiration here is not the Brothers Grimm, but his friend Charles Williams, who perhaps is best-known today for his connection with the Inkings, a circle of Christian writers which included by Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, but who was a highly-regarded poet in his day and the author of fantasy novels which brought magic into the modern age. Lewis tries to adopt a style similar to Williams’s in this book and the theme of magic encroaching on the mundane 20th Century is one that Williams liked to use.

Mark and Jane Studdock are a not-exactly-happily-married couple. They’re not exactly un-happily-married, but their relationship, after less than a year of marriage, is already showing strains. Mark has just gained a fellowship at Bracton, a small college in the town of Edgestow and Jane is trying to finish her dissertation for her Master’s Degree from an neighboring woman’s college.

The relationship between Jane and Mark form an important subplot in the book and is both one of the novel’s strengths and its weaknesses. It’s a strength in that it gives the work an emotional grounding that the previous, more fantastical novels lacked. It’s a weakness in that Lewis’s experience with marriage was almost entirely academic and based on his observations of his married friends.

In the movie adaptation of William Nicholson’s play Shadowlands, based on the relationship between Lewis and the American poet Joy Gresham, a friend teases him that he’s a writer of children’s books who has never had children and a lecturer on marriage who has never known a wife. There’s some truth to that gibe. Lewis did not marry until very late in his life and spent most of his time in the almost exclusively male company of his Oxford colleagues.

The novel begins with Jane bitterly quoting words from the Anglican marriage service and musing on how little the liturgical ideal matches the reality. I suppose it’s appropriate that Lewis starts with words from the liturgy, because he never strays far from church orthodoxy as his characters discuss marriage. The service also contains the words “Love, Honor and Obey”, and part of Jane’s subplot is how she comes to terms with the command “Wives, submit your husbands.” This is one of several things modern readers find annoying with this book.

But St. Paul’s admonition has a flip side which is often overlooked. As wives are obliged to defer to their husbands, Paul also requires husbands to be deserving of that deference. It’s not a perfectly balanced reciprocation, perhaps, but then neither is it an entirely one-way street either. This is a lesson Mark needs to learn. He has been preoccupied with his own career and climbing the greasy pole of faculty politics at Bracton and had been frankly taking his wife for granted.

Unfortunately, although we see Mark and Jane grappling with their relationship separately, and in conversations with others, we rarely see them talking to each other. Granted, this is a big part of their problem; but since we don’t actually see them working things out, their eventual reconciliation rings a little hollow.

Jane has been suffering from disturbing dreams. She has one of a man in a prison cell receiving a visitor who unscrews his head and carries it off, and about a sleeper buried underground. They bother her, but she doesn't know what they mean.

She winds up describing her dream to her neighbors, Dr. Dimble and his wife. Dr. Dimble had been her tutor when she had been an undergraduate, and she had remained a close friend. Lewis had a great affection for his own tutor when he was a young man, and tutors in his stories are always good people. Dr. Dimble thinks her dreams are significant, but doesn't seem to think she needs a psychiatrist. “I’m not going to give you any advice. But if you do decide to go to anyone about that dream, I wish you would first consider going to someone whose address Margery or I will give you.”

With his fellowship, Mark has become a full-fledged member of the “Progressive Element” at Bracton College, a faction that seeks to modernize the college and opposes the calcified policies of the faculty’s Old Guard.

Lewis, ever the Medievalist, was no fan of Progress. To a large extent, I suppose, this was due to his traditionalist religious beliefs, but I suspect his love for old things, especially the old Norse sagas, which preceded his conversion to Christianity has something to do with it as well. And perhaps, although he rarely speaks of them, his experiences in the trenches, where the promise of 20th Century science quickly turned to more efficient ways of killing.

In any case, I think that Lewis’s rejection of Modernity is only partially a reactionary dislike of Change; he is also reacting to an attitude prevalent in his era and still common today, although under a different name, about Progress as a Sacred Thing. After all, You Can’t Fight Progress. His friend J.R.R. Tolkien touched on something similar once when he drew a distinction between the Scientific Theory of Evolution, which is, he said, about Change, and the Popular Myth of Evolution, which is about Improvement. When, in one of the Narnia books, the corrupt governor of a distant island defended his policy of permitting the slave trade, he did so on the grounds that it was “Progress”. Prince Caspian replies that he has seen the same in an egg. “In Narnia we call it ‘going bad.’”

But back to Bracton. The college is considering selling a piece of property known as Bragdon Wood to the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or the N.I.C.E.; a kind of think tank ostensibly devoted to applying the latest in Science to Government and Social Planning.

The N.I.C.E. was the first-fruits of that constructive fusion between the state and the laboratory on which so many thoughtful people base their hopes of a better world. It was to be free from almost all the tiresome restraints – “red tape” was the word its supporters used – which have hitherto hampered research in this country.

I have to say, Lewis does a lovely job with the names in this book, and the N.I.C.E. is wickedly ironic. Conservatives no doubt would call the N.I.C.E. an example of Evil Big Government, but Lewis is rather vague about this. The line about “red tape” suggests the opposite to me, and the Institute's supporters sound to me very much like some of the present-day boosters of Charter Schools. As the story progresses we see the N.I.C.E. establishing its own parallel government which winds up absorbing the existing government of the city.

At the moment, the N.I.C.E. wants to buy Bragdon Wood, a small wooded parcel of land enclosed by and old wall with legendary connections to the time of King Arthur, for a new facility and it is looking to create a partnership with the college. This of course is too great an opportunity to pass up, and the Progressive Faction rigs the order of business at the College Meeting to ensure that it goes through.

At one point we have a bit where Lewis unexpectedly indulges in a bit of the prophecy which Science Fiction is supposed to provide. A couple professors are discussing the benefits which a partnership with the N.I.C.E. will bring to the college. One describes an “Analytical Notice-Board” which will compile and display all the research done by various departments in real-time, sounding very much like a localized version of the Internet. Then another administrator puts it all in perspective by gushing about the new up-to-date toilets the N.I.C.E. plans to install.

After the meeting, Mark is introduced to another of the college fellows: Lord Feverstone, who turns out to be our slimy friend from Out of the Silent Planet, Dick Devine. He has done well for himself since his trip to Malacandra and has somehow acquired a title. Mark has always considered the Progressive Element to be the “Inner Circle” of the college and his ambition had been to join it; but in talking to Feverstone, he realizes that the faculty administrators he had jealously sought to join were themselves minor players. Feverstone he confides that he has been watching Mark’s career with interest and would like to recruit him for the N.I.C.E.

Mark has always wanted to be an insider, and this is his chance. At Feverstone’s urging, he agrees to visit the N.I.C.E. headquarters to speak with its director. At the same time, Jane makes up her mind to see the person the Dimbles have recommended about her dreams.

Without realizing it, they are choosing sides in a cosmic conflict.


NEXT:  Belbury and St. Anne's

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: Perelandra (part 2)

Christian Doctrine is never far from the surface in Lewis’s writings, and Perelandra is, I think, the most overtly religious of his Space Trilogy. It imagines the planet Venus, or Perelandra in the Old Solar tongue, as an unfallen Paradise, a second Eden. Dr. Elwin Ransom has been sent to Perelandra by the Oyarsa of Malacandra, the angelic spirit which rules the planet Mars, in order to foil an attack on that planet by the Dark Archon of Tellus. Ransom has met Perelandra’s equivalent of Eve; and where there’s Eve, you just know a Serpent is going to show up.

Weston, the belligerent physicist from Out of the Silent Planet, has rebuilt his spaceship and has now arrived on Venus. When we saw him last he was a pompous materialist, a caricature of the Late-Victorian Scientist, much like Professor Challenger from Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, only without the more endearing foibles. Since then, Weston has had what one might call a religious experience. He has come to believe in a Higher Power; in fact, he claims that he has been in contact with this Power. But the Power he now believes in is not what Ransom would exactly call God.

“How far does it go? Would you still obey the Life-Force if you found it prompting you to murder me?” 

“Yes.” 

“Or sell England to the Germans?” 

“Yes.” 

“Or to print lies as serious research in a scientific periodical?” 

“Yes.” 

“God help you!: said Ransom.

I've always found this a significant exchange. The old Weston, caricature though he was, still possessed a certain code of morality. He embarked on his original trip to Mars not for wealth (unlike his avaricious partner Devine) or even fame, but rather to benefit humanity. Although he was willing to hand Ransom over to the (supposedly) blood-thirsty sorns, he felt some scruples about it – not because of any qualms about murder, but because he felt that an educated man like Ransom was more valuable than a common illiterate plebe. Even Oyarsa, in passing judgment upon the Earthmen, perceived that Weston was not “broken” like Devine, an amoral creature driven by solely by greed, but merely “bent”; possessing at least some sense of ethics.

But now he has renounced what moral code he previously had. Ransom’s questions in that passage are an ironic escalation in seriousness. Most of us would consider murder a greater crime than lying, but the old Weston, the scientific materialist, regarded Science – real Science, not the fuzzy humanities crap that Ransom studied – as a Supreme Calling. That he would now gladly murder an acquaintance is unsurprising; that he would betray his country more disturbing, (keep in mind, this novel was written during the Second World War); but that he would debase his own profession by peddling falsehood in journals dedicated to the discovery of scientific Truth shows how far he has fallen.

Ransom desperately tries to find some point of common ground in order to persuade Weston to see reason, but this only makes Weston angry. He replies with a rant that to me recalls some of the teachings of Ayn Rand. I don’t know if Lewis read any Rand; he was more likely referencing the popular view of Nietzsche, but I’m not familiar enough with him to say for sure.

“Idiot,” said Weston. His voice was almost a howl and he had risen to his feet. “Idiot,” he repeated. “Can you understand nothing? Will you always try to press everything back into the miserable framework of your old jargon about self and self-sacrifice? That is the old accursed dualism in another form. There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe. In so far as I am the conductor of the central forward pressure of the universe, I am it. Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe. I, Weston, am your God and your Devil. I call that Force into me completely . . . .”

Weston gets his wish. At this terrible blasphemy, his body convulses and he becomes possessed by his Higher Power, the Bent Oyarsa of Earth. Lewis never directly identifies this being as Satan, but that’s who it is, and now he sets out to corrupt this world’s Eve as he did the one on ours.

Maleldil, the Ruling Entity of the Cosmos, (spoiler alert: Maleldil is really Aslan), has given the first Man and Woman of Perelandra only one command. You might remember that in Eden it was something about trees and fruit. In this case the command involves the Fixed Land. Most of the islands of Perelandra are floating masses of dense vegetation, but there are solid islands in the great planet-wide ocean. The Man and the Woman are permitted to visit the Fixed Lands, but not to settle and stay there.

Why? It seems pretty arbitrary to Ransom too; but since that is Maleldil’s command, Weston devotes his energies to persuading The Green Lady, this world’s Eve, to defy the command and spend a night on the Fixed Land. Ransom finds himself at a disadvantage. He can’t very well tell her that Weston is Bad or Evil or even Untrustworthy because the Lady has no frame of reference to understand what these things mean. And, she greatly desires to gain wisdom, to “grow older” as she puts it. Ransom must marshal the best counter-arguments he can.

This debate, which Lewis tells us continues off and on over the course of several days, forms the core of the novel; and in it, Lewis recasts just about every argument ever made on the subjects of Disobedience and Free Will. Ransom frequently finds himself in over his head. Fortunately, the Green Lady has a short attention span and tends to get bored when Weston and Ransom’s wrangling get too academic. Well, that’s probably unfair. The fact is that the World is so wonderful and new to the Lady that Theology is really low on her priority list of things to explore and discover.

It is when the Lady wanders off and leaves Ransom and Weston alone that the horror begins. Many critics have held that John Milton, when writing Paradise Lost was “of the Devil’s camp without knowing it.” Milton’s Lucifer is suave and charismatic and compelling, much more interesting that the stiff, uptight angels. Lewis disagrees, and portrays the Tempter here as someone who can be intelligent and charming when it suits him, but who regards these qualities merely as tools.

When he’s alone with Ransom, he doesn't bother with philosophical sophistries or cunning persuasion; he doesn't even bother with human posture. The personality he had displayed before goes off like a light switch, and although Ransom can’t put his finger on exactly what is wrong, Weston no longer seems human at all. He says nothing to Ransom except to simply call his name from time to time, and when Ransom replies, the Un-Man, (as Ransom now thinks of him), simply says: “Nothing.” The Un-Man does that all night – unlike Ransom, it doesn't need to sleep. “Ransom… Ransom …” “What the Hell do you want?” “Nothing.”

In another, disturbing passage, Ransom comes across a small, mutilated frog-like creature. He realizes that the Un-Man has done this, and has left a trail of maimed amphibians all along the beach. He’s mutilating frogs for no real reason at all – not even for fun. He’s just doing it – literally – for the Hell of it. Ransom attempts to put the creature out of its misery, but the poor thing proves dreadfully hard to kill and he winds up torturing it even more in his efforts to end its suffering.

This, Lewis says, is the nature of Evil. It’s not the grand, tragic Lucifer defying Heaven in blank verse; it is a bratty little kid doing petty, pointless, mean stuff just to be annoying.

As the daytime debates with Weston drag on, Lewis finds himself despairing. The Lady has not succumbed to the Tempter’s persuasive arguments –yet. But can she hold out forever? Can Ransom hold out running interference and trying to counter Westons’s arguments? Is it fair that Ransom alone bear the responsibility of battling the Prince of Darkness?

Does this battle solely exist on a moral, philosophical plane? What if an elephant had stepped on the Serpent in the Garden of Eden? Is Ransom expected to take on Weston physically? Ransom at first rejects this idea, but as he argues with himself and second-guesses himself through the night he keeps coming back to it. His own experiences during the First World War were so different from his boyhood notions of battle that he has a dubious opinion of his own courage. “When did I ever win a fight in my life?” On top of that, he is a middle-aged, sedentary academic, hardly up to punching out Satan.

Then again, so is Weston.

As he argues with himself a Voice comes to him in the night, telling him “It is not for nothing you were named Ransom.” This boggles him. He’s a philologist and he knows the derivation of his name, (it’s “Ranolf’s Son” and has nothing to do with the English word "ransom”) The thought that all of this, even a thing as trivial as his name, is a part of something which had been foreseen and planned for centuries or more in advance gives him a deeper sense of the gravity of the whole situation. The Voice adds “My name also is Ransom.”

Ransom makes the decision and steels himself to act. The Tempter can only continue his campaign as long as it has the use of Weston’s body. So Ransom must kill Weston.

I always found this direction a peculiar one, that I’m not entirely comfortable with. But keep in mind, Lewis wrote this novel during World War Two, in which British soldiers really were physically taking arms to battle the Forces of Evil, which probably had a profound influence on his thinking. In any case, Ransom confronts the Un-Man. When he realizes that Ransom seriously means to harm him, the Un-Man flees.

There follows an epic chase and running battle which takes the two across the ocean to the Fixed Land. At one point, Weston’s own personality comes to the surface – or is it only another mind-game by the Un-Man? Ransom cannot tell – and gibbers nihilistic despair about the nature of reality. It gives a glimpse of Lewis’s view of damnation; not the horrific tortures of Dante, but a loss of self. Lewis’s Hell is a diabolical melting pot in which individuals lose their identities to merge with their Master. In a similar way, in his book The Screwtape Letters, Lewis has a demon describe the souls of the damned as delicacies to be devoured.

Finally, deep in a cavern beneath the Fixed Land, Ransom and the Un-Man have their final confrontation. Ransom bashes his Enemy’s face in with a rock: “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost, here goes – I mean, Amen.”

Now that it’s dead, Weston’s body no longer seems inhuman. The evil force animating it is gone. Ransom casts the body into a volcanic crevice to bury it and then, feeling an obligation to commemorate the passing of what once had been a great man, he carves a memorial inscription. “That was a tomfool thing to do,” he admits when he has finished it, “But there ought to be some record.”

Ransom emerges from the caverns and meets the Oyarsa of Malacandra and his Perelandrian equivalent. Here we get another of Lewis’s idée fixes: that gender is something that transcends biology. Although the eldila are angelic beings without sex in the biological sense, they nevertheless have qualities, the one of masculinity and the other of femininity. This also comes out of his theme that the ancient legends of gods and goddesses are kind of racial memories of the Cosmic Order: The god Mars is an echo of the Oyarsa of Malacandra; the goddess Venus an echo of Perelandra.

He also meets again the Green Lady, who has finally been reunited with the King, this world’s Adam. Whereas on Malacandra, the sentient races are subordinate to a ruling Oyarsa, on this world rulership is being handed over to the King and the Queen – as should have happened on Earth had things not gone wrong. The King, whose name is Tor, comes off not nearly as interesting as the Lady, but then again we see very little of him. It does strike Ransom as somewhat unfair that she had to resist temptation and he didn't have to do anything, but Tor had his own struggles. In a secret place, he was shown what was happening with his Lady. It occurs to me that perhaps Tor’s temptation was to intervene in his Lady’s temptation and prevent her from deciding on her own, but Lewis does not specifically say this.

Ransom witnesses the great ceremony crowning Tor and Tindril the King and Queen of their world. It is only now that Ransom notices that his heel is bleeding where Weston bit it during their battle. But it is now time for him to return home. Another white casket-like box has been prepared for him in which he will be carried back to Earth.

At their parting, Tindril unconsciously echoes what Weston said during his brief moment of lucidity during the earlier battle. He said life was like a rind one was sinking through, and past that rind was oblivion. The Lady also compares life to the thick rind of a fruit, but beyond that skin lies sweetness.

With that, and with the blessings of the King, Ransom is carried off back to his home.


NEXT:  We visit the strangest planet of all, Earth, which lies under the shadow of That Hideous Strength. Have a NICE day!

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: Perelandra (part 1)

Erich von Däniken speculated that the stories in ancient myth and legend about gods angels and miracles were actually distorted accounts of space aliens. C.S. Lewis anticipated this idea and inverted it. In Lewis’s cosmos, space aliens are actually angels.

Elwin Ransom, a mild-mannered professor of philology, knows about these heavenly beings first-hand, having been taken to the planet Malacandra (known to terrestrial astronomers as Mars), by a pair of unscrupulous scientists, and having met Oyarsa, the ruling intelligence of that planet. He has learned that each planet has its own such planetary genius, but the Oyarsa of Earth rebelled against Maleldil, who rules over all, and waged war against his fellows. As a result, Earth has been quarantined from the rest of the Solar System.


At the end of Out of the Silent Planet, Oyarsa hints to Ransom that great changes will be coming to the Solar System in the near future and the long “Sitzkrieg” of Thulcandra, the Silent Planet (as Earth is called), may be coming to an end. Perelandra begins with Ransom preparing for another journey into space, this time as an agent for the divine eldila.

In some of our previous looks at Old-School Science Fiction, I’ve invoked the Nebular Hypothesis, the theory that the sun and planets coalesced out of a great cloud of interstellar gas which is the basis of our current understanding of the origin of the Solar System. When the theory was first proposed, it was assumed that the outer parts of the cloud would have coalesced first, and that therefore the outer planets are older than the ones closer to the Sun. We’ve seen how this assumption colored the depiction of the planets in science fiction for much of the 20th Century: Mars was usually presented as an ancient, dying world, such as perhaps Earth will be in several million years; and Venus as a young, primeval world, similar to what Earth was like in prehistoric times. Pulp writers portraying Venus were often tempted to forest it with Paleozoic jungles inhabited with antediluvian monsters.

C.S. Lewis, drawing on some of these ideas for his Space Trilogy, followed the tradition of making Venus, or Perelandra as he called it, a young planet; but he went past the Antediluvian, all the way to the Edenic.
Lewis’s Perelandra is an unfallen world, a sinless paradise. The dark archon of our world wants to change that. Hitherto, he has been unable to cross the orbit of Earth’s Moon, due to the cosmic interdiction of Maleldil; but Weston’s space ship has changed everything. The quarantine has been broken and the terrestrial forces of Darkness are about to stage an assault on Perelandra, to corrupt it as Earth has been corrupted. Oyarsa has recruited Ransom to go to Venus to prevent this from happening.

Lewis used the writings of H.G. Wells, particularly The First Men in the Moon, as his inspiration for Out of the Silent Planet, but Perelandra draws more from fantastic literature of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance. As Lewis himself later put it, “I took a hero to Mars once in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus". It’s typical of Lewis that he found angels to be more believable than Weston’s technobabble.

Arriving on Perelandra, he finds it covered completely with water, which seemed a plausible conjecture before the Mariner space probes gave us a better look at Venus. The oceans of the planet are sweet, which both symbolizes the world’s uncorrupted state and on a more prosaic level makes sense assuming that the planet is several million years younger than Earth. Ransom encounters floating islands, composed of densely-matted vegetation, upon which trees grow and animals dwell. Lewis does a wonderful job of describing the strange, lush world that Ransom finds.

It is on one of these islands that Ransom, anticipating James T. Kirk, meets a green-skinned space babe. She is the Eve of this Paradise, this world’s First Woman. Ransom is able to speak with her, because the language he learned on Malacandra turns out to be a lingua franca of the Solar System, (and the fact that he already knew “Old Solar” was the reason he was chosen for the mission); but he is puzzled that, apart from the color of her skin, the Lady seems perfectly human. Human-looking aliens in science fiction are usually explained by things like Parallel Evolution, or a Common Ancestry from a Precursor Race, or Cheap Make-Up Budgets, or in many cases Lazy Writers. Lewis, naturally, gives a reason fitting with his theology: the natives of Perelandra have a human form because that is the form Maleldil assumed when he became a mortal on Earth.

It occurs to me in this reading that the color of the Lady’s skin might be symbolic both of her innocence and of the unfallen nature of her world, full of life and potential. I hadn’t thought of it before simply because, well, green-skinned aliens are something of a cliché. But I think it might be significant here, if for no other reason the comparison with Ransom’s own skin. He was carried to Perelandra in a box of a translucent material; as a result, half of his body has a bad sunburn from the solar radiation and the other half remains British pasty white. The Lady calls him Piebald Man because of his half-and-half appearance, which she found amusing when she first saw him; but this appearance might also signify Ransom’s own imperfect nature: good intentions mixed with uncertainty and doubt; the desire to do what’s right conflicting with sinful impulses.

Sex does not seem to be one of those impulses. He arrived on Perelandra naked, and the Lady is naked as well; but he is so self-conscious about his own appearance – he is, after all, no Adonis: a sedentary, middle-aged college professor with a ludicrous sunburn to boot; and she, despite her peculiar coloring, is overwhelmingly beautiful – that desire does not come into the picture.

We do not learn until the very end of the story that the Lady’s name in Tinidril. It’s possible that, being this world’s first woman and newly-created, she has not yet felt a need to take a name or to be given one. In any case, Ransom thinks of her as The Lady, and as she is this world’s Eve, I suppose she cannot avoid being an Archetype. She is innocent, but not unintelligent, and has a great desire to learn. She and Ransom have several conversations in which he learns as much from her as she from him.

But eventually, you know the Serpent is going to show up.


NEXT:   Enter Weston; a Belief in Higher Powers; the Terror of the Un-Man and Moral Conflict

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet part 3

Unca Joe Campbell used to talk about the Call to Adventure as an integral part of the Hero’s Journey and how in cases where the Hero rejects the call, Adventure winds up chasing him down anyway.

Ransom is on an Adventure whether he likes it or not; a former old school chum named Devine and an unscrupulous physicist named Weston have abducted him and taken him to a planet called Malacandra for yet undisclosed reasons. But he has been strenuously trying to avoid another type of call. Weston and Devine were to hand him over to the enigmatic sorns, natives of the planet, but Ransom ran off and took refuge with the friendly hrossi, another species of Malacanrian.

He has spent the past few weeks among the hrossi, leanring their language and culture; but this idyllic period cannot last. The Call re-asserts itself in the form of an eldil, an invisible creature seemingly without a body which summons him to appear before Oyarsa, the entity which rules over the hrossi and the séroni. And as if to punctuate the message, Weston and Devine show up about this time and shoot one of Ransom’s friends.


Overwhelmed by guilt at having brought misfortune to the gentle hrossi, Ransom has no choice but to obey Oyarsa’s summons.

The journey to Oyarsa is a long one, which takes him out of the warm valleys of the hross up into the cold, high plateau regions where the enigmatic sorns dwell. He has spent several weeks now in terror of the sorns and trying to avoid them; but up on the high harandra, or plateau, he is nearly overcome by the cold and thinness of the air and is glad for the shelter of a sorn’s dwelling.

The sorn turns out to be every bit as hospitable as the hrossi, although much more grave in temperament and less gregarious. Ransom initially found their towering, elongated forms and their solemn, almost-human faces intimidating; but the sorn welcomes Ransom and offers him food and rest, and offers to carry him the rest of the journey.

We later learn that the sorns had originally been sent to greet the earthmen because, of all the people of Malacandra, they were the most similar to humans in appearance. This proved to be a mistake: their superficial humanoid shape to Ransom made their otherworldly features all the more disturbing; an “uncanny valley” effect.

The sorns are highly intelligent, and their culture values knowledge and understanding. This had initially led Ransom to the erroneous conclusion that the sorns were some kind of ruling class of intellectuals. In fact, none of the three species of hnau, the sapient races of Malacandra, rules over the other; all are subject to Oyarsa, who himself is subject to a cosmic entity known as Maleldil.

In this, once again, we see Lewis the medievalist. A Medievalist writing science fiction is bound to come up with something eccentric. Here he adopts the medieval idea of a feudal hierarchy extending downward to the animals below and upward to the angels above and God above the angels; and presents a similar hierarchy on Malacandra, with the hnau superior to the beasts and the eldil superior to the hnau and Maleldil over them all. Except that Lewis leaves out the middle part: contrary to what Ransom expects, the hnau of Malacandra are not themselves organized into ranks.

Ransom spends one evening on his journey the guest of an older sorn and his students, who question him about his world. He had been guarded in discussing Earth with the hrossi, partially because he was embarrassed by our history of destruction and bloodshed compared to the peaceful hrossi, and partially because he remembered the scene in H.G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon in which Cavor’s descriptions of humanity prompt the Selenites to kill him. Now, however, Ransom hides nothing; and the sorns are shocked by his descriptions of war, slavery and prostitution.

“It is because they have no Oyarsa,” one says. “It is because every one of them wants to be a little Oyarsa himself,” another suggests.

The sorns find it highly significant that humans are the only type of hnau, intelligent life-forms, on the Earth.

“Your thought must be at the mercy of your blood,” said the old sorn. “For you cannot compare it with thought that floats on a different blood.”

Ransom’s sorn guide eventually brings him to another lowland region, lush and verdant, where there is an island in the middle of a large lake. There are many eldil here, and with practice, Ransom can almost manage to see them. Here there are also many visitors, and Ransom has the opportunity to speak with a pfifltrigg, a representative of the third type of hnau on Malacandra. If the hrossi are the poets of Malacandra, and the sorns the thinkers, then the pfifltriggi are the artisans, delighting in making intricate objects. The one Ransom meets is carving his likeness to be added to a huge frieze depicting the history of the planet.

Finally, Ransom is brought before Oyarsa himself, Ransom cannot see him – like the other eldila does not exactly have a physical body like that Ransom is familiar with – but he can hear Oyarsa’s voice; a voice “with no blood in it,” as a hross comments to Ransom. “Light is instead of blood for them.”

From Oyarsa, Ransom learns a bit more about Cosmic history. Thulcandra, “the Silent Planet,” as the Malacandrans call Earth, was not always isolated from the rest of the Cosmos.

Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world – he was brighter and greater than I – and then we did not call it Thulcandra. It is the longest of all stories and the bitterest. He became bent. That was before any life came on your world. Those were the Bent Years of which we still speak in the heavens, when he was not yet bound to Thulcnadra but free like us. It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own. He smote your moon with his left hand and with his right he brought the cold death on my harandra before its time.”

And if this sounds like the Fall of Lucifer, then yes, you have been paying attention. . A running theme throughout the entire trilogy is the notion that Medieval and Classical mythology contains something almost like a racial memory of the Cosmic Order which exists beyond Earth’s sphere. And Lewis, the dedicated Christian, would not have disagreed with the designation of myth either. He had at one time argued with his friend J.R.R. Tolkien that myths were lies “although breathed through silver”, but had eventually come around to Tolkien’s assertion that a story can be mythic and yet also true.

When Weston and Devine first arrived in their spaceship, Oyarsa wished to speak to them, and sent sorns to teach them the Malacandran language. They would not come. Since the sorns reported that the earthmen were gathering pieces of “sun’s blood” – gold; explaining Devine’s interest in the planet – Oyarsa sent the message that they would not be permitted to collect any more until they had come to see him. Instead, to Oyarsa’s perplexity, the two packed up in their spaceship and left. Ransom recalls Devine’s comments about “human sacrifice” and realizes how the two misinterpreted Oyarsa’s request.

About this time Devine and Weston are brought forward, having been captured by the hrossi and physically brought to Oyarsa’s home. Weston, not seeing Oyarsa’s corporeal form, assumes that one of the other creatures present must be a shaman practicing ventriloquism. In a farcical scene, Weston attempts to impress and intimidate the Malacandrans by shouting at the elderly hross he mistakes for the shaman. It takes a while for Weston to grasp that there really is an invisible entity seated before him to whom he must give account.

Here follows the dialogue to which the whole novel has been leading. Weston attempts to give a speech defending humanity, and in particular, his vision of space colonization to preserve and extend the human race. Unfortunately, his grasp of the language is rudimentary and he is forced to rely on Ransom to translate for him. Ransom is somewhat more fluent, but still he can only do this by stripping Weston’s high-sounding rhetoric and colonialist assumptions down to what he really means.

I have to admit a little discomfort at this scene, because Weston’s dream of humanity spreading out through the stars is deeply-ingrained in the heart of science fiction; and Lewis does turn Weston into a straw-man in order to mock him. When Oyarsa replies that just as each person has a finite life span, so does each planet and each species living on that planet, Weston becomes angry.

‘Trash! Defeatist trash!’ he shouted at Oyarsa in English; then, drawing himself up to his full height, he added in Malacandrian, ‘You say your Maleldil let all go dead. Other one, Bent One [the Oyarsa of Earth, or Lucifer], he fight, jump, live – not all talkee-talkee. Me no care Maleldil. Like Bent One better; me on his side.’

Oyarsa has heard enough to render a judgment. Devine is not just bent – the Malacandrans have no word, remember, for bad – he is broken. He lives for nothing except greed and is little more than a talking animal. Weston, however, does have some sense of ethics, be they twisted. He really does have the welfare of Humanity at heart, even if he has little or no regard for individual humans. Oyarsa would destroy Devine as one might a dangerous beast and try to cure Weston, if he had the authority; but as the Earthmen come from a different planet they lie outside his jurisdiction. Instead he orders the two to return to their spaceship the next day and leave Malacandra forever.

Oyarsa invites Ransom to remain on Malacandra, and he is sorely tempted. In the end, he decides he will risk the flight back to Earth with Weston and Devine. ‘Love of our own kind … is not the greatest of laws, but you Oyarsa, have said it is a law. If I cannot live in Thulcandra, it is better for me not to live at all.’

The trip back will take ninety days; since the planets have moved out of opposition in the past several weeks. Oyarsa commands the sorns and the pfifltriggi to outfit the ship with an additional oxygen supply to last the longer voyage. In addition, he commands his eldila to escort the ship and watch over its passengers to ensure that Devine and Weston don’t decide to extend their air supply by killing Ransom.

As they leave the planet, Ransom looks back at the valley they left.

Seen from the height which the spaceship had now attained, in all their unmistakable geometry, they put to shame his original impression that they were natural valleys. They were gigantic feats of engineering, about which he had learned nothing; feats accomplished, if all were true, before human history began … before animal history began. Or was that only mythology? He knew it would seem like mythology when he got back to Earth (if he ever got back), but the presence of Oyarsa was still too fresh a memory to allow him any real doubts. It even occurred to him that the distinction between history and mythology might be itself meaningless outside the Earth.

After a long and dangerous voyage through space, the ship returns home. The spacecraft is destroyed, a precaution of Oyarsa’s to prevent Weston from coming back. Ransom is ill for some time and is not entirely sure the whole experience wasn't a dream, until a colleague of his named Lewis writes to him about a 12th  Century Platonist manuscript which describes a voyage through the heavens and mentions a kind of planetary intelligence called an Oyarses. Many adventure stories of that era begin with a frame to tell how the writer of the book came to learn the story he relates; in this case, the frame comes at the end.

Before Ransom left Malacandra, Oyarsa predicted that important things would be happening during the next celestial cycle and that the long siege of Thulcandra might be coming to an end. We see some of this in the next book, Perelandra.

C.S. Lewis Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet part 2

Despite having been drugged and forcibly abducted by a slimy school chum and a Nietzchean physicist, Dr. Elwin Ransom, a philologist on vacation, is actually starting to enjoy his involuntary journey through the heavens. At least he was until he overheard his one-time pal Devine discussing with his colleague Weston the sorns.

The spaceship lands on the planet Malacandra, which is the name given to it by its inhabitants. Weston never does tell Ransom which planet of the Solar System it is; his policy is to keep Ransom in the dark as much as possible. They land in what appears to be a broad canyon several miles wide near a structure that Weston and Devine built as a base camp on their previous expedition. Ransom helps Weston and Devine unload the spacecraft and then he sees a strange creature approaching.

For days now, Ransom has been having nightmares about the mysterious sorns that Devine hinted about. His ideas of alien life have been shaped by the tentacled Martians and the insectoid Selenites of H.G. Wells, but this looks nothing like what he expected. The creature is tall and elongated, looking from the distance like an ambulatory stick-man.

Devine had boasted that Ransom would be too terrified by his first sight of a sorn to flee his companions; but Ransom knows that the two intend to hand him over to these creatures and so he’s not about to trust any of them. He’s too terrified not to flee. He bolts and runs off into the alien forest.

After wandering through the forest alone for some time, he comes across another strange creature: a tall, otter-like thing which Ransom at first takes for a beast until he realizes that it is trying to communicate with him. Instantly his instincts as a philologist take over.

A new world he had already seen – but a new, an extra-terrestrial, a non-human language was a different matter. Somehow he had not thought of this in connection with the sorns; now, it flashed upon him like a revelation. The love of knowledge is a kind of madness. In the fraction of a second which it took Ransom to decide that the creature was really talking, and while he still knew that he might be facing death, his imagination had leaped over every fear and hope and probability of his situation to follow the dazzling prospect of making a Malacandrian grammar.

Ransom learns that the creature is a hross, and accompanies him to his village. The hrossi are an open, friendly people who welcome the strange visitor from another planet and teach him their language.

I think it's significant that when Ransom first meets the hross, he starts out by trying to learn the creature's language instead of trying to teach him his. I had it in my head that Lewis made a point that in doing so Ransom managed to avoid the mistake many colonialists and missionaries make of inflicting his own culture on a new one instead of trying to understand it.

Except that in re-reading the passage, I couldn't find Lewis saying that. And thinking about it more, I realized that I was thinking of a passage from a different science fiction novel, (I'm thinking it was Anne McCaffrey's Decision at Doona).

Be that as it may, the fact remains that on the whole, Ransom doesn't try to impose his own culture on the hrossi; and by living with them, learns much more about Malacandra than Weston and Devine do.

Early on in the novel, Weston speaks rather sneeringly about Ransom's area of expertise, not considering philology to be a "real" science -- reflecting what C.P. Snow called "The Two Cultures" as well as the later distinction drawn by fans between "Hard SF" and the more wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey stuff. But this is really unfair of him. When Ransom meets the hross, it is his scientific curiosity which overcomes his initial fear. All through the book we see Ransom trying to analyze the things he encounters; trying to extrapolate the rules of Malacandrian grammar, constructing hypotheses about Malacandrian life and society and revising those hypotheses as he acquires new evidence -- just as a character in an H.G. Wells story would.

They seem to have a simple, stone age culture with the most basic of tools, their economy is based largely on agriculture, and they enjoy composing and reciting epic poetry. Despite their primitive culture, they do understand the idea of other planets and that Ransom has come from one. They guess that it must be the one they call Thulcandra, or the Silent Planet.

There are three intelligent races, or hnau, on Malacandra: the hrossi, the pfifltriggi and the séroni (which Ransom realizes must be the plural of sorn). The three species are ruled by someone called Oyarsa.
Like a character in a Wells novel, as Ransom bit by bit learns about the world in which he’s been thrust, he develops theories to explain what he’s found – which he frequently winds up tossing or at least revising as he learns more.

The hrossi bear some resemblance to the the Navi from the movie Avatar. I suppose this is mostly because both races are furry and extremely tall, and both have a primitive but idealized society. (And both races serve a more powerful intelligence of which the human visitors are unaware).

In one passage, Lewis describes the hrossi in a way to which I think furry fans could relate:

...the rationality of the hross tempted you to think of it as a man. Then it became abominable -- a man seven feet high, with a snaky body, covered, face and all, with thick black animal hair, and whiskered like a cat. But starting from the other end you had an animal with everything an animal ought to have -- glossy coat, liquid eye, sweet breath and whitest teeth -- and added to all these, as though Paradise had never been lost and earliest dreams were true, the charm of speech and reason. Nothing could be more disgusting than the one impression; nothing more delightful than the other. It all depended on the point of view.

There is no strife or warfare among the hrossi. They do not seem to have a word for “bad”; the nearest word Ransom can find to describe something wicked is “bent”.

Which is not to say that there is no death in this world. A large predator creature called a hnarka is spotted in the lake by the village and the hrossi plan a hunting party to kill it. Ransom is eager to join the party; he wants to feel like he’s a contributing member of the community; but the hunt is interrupted by the appearance of an eldil, another type of being on Malacandra which does not seem to have a physical body. Ransom cannot see the eldil, although the hrossi can. The eldil delivers a message that Ransom is to go to Oyarsa.

Ransom isn’t sure he likes this idea. He reckons that this Oyarsa is some kind of arch-sorn and he still fears them. But when one of his hrossi friends is shot by Weston and Devine who have finally caught up with him, Ransom blames himself and realizes that he can linger among the gentle hrossi no longer.


NEXT:  Brought before Oyarsa, and Weston’s Case for Humanity

C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet part 1

A couple of Oxford professors were once lamenting that no one seemed to be publishing the kind of books they enjoyed, stories of wonder and of imagination. They came to the conclusion that if they wanted that kind of stories, they’d have to write the books themselves. And so the two men made an agreement: one would write a story about travel to other times, and the other would write one about travel to other worlds.

J.R.R. Tolkien never completed his Time Travel story, in which a father and son take a psychic journey to the fall of Atlantis, which the natives called Numenor, although his unfinished draft was eventually incorporated into Christopher Tolkien’s massive History of Middle-Earth. His friend, C.S. Lewis stuck with the project and his tale of Interplanetary Travel became his novel Out of the Silent Planet and the beginning of his Space Trilogy.

The series does not have a good overall title. Sometimes it’s called the Space Trilogy, sometimes the Ransom Trilogy. It’s not even a trilogy in the post-Tolkien sense of a sprawling epic told over three volumes. Although each book builds off the previous one and although the main protagonist Ransom is the central character through the series, each book is a separate, individual story and each one a different kind of story.

Lewis was a fan of science fiction. As a matter of personal taste he didn't care much for stories which emphasized the technical Hard Science stuff -- he called them “Engineer’s Stories” -- but he enjoyed tales of wonder and other worlds.. He cited David Lindsey’s 1920 novel A Voyage to Arcturus for showing him how journeys to alien worlds can be used as settings to explore philosophical and spiritual themes. He was greatly impressed by Olaf Stapelton’s Last and First Men, and although he disagreed with Stapelton’s philosophy, he greatly admired Stapelton’s invention. In one of Lewis’s fantasy novels, The Great Divorce, he admitted lifting a plot device from a short story he had read in an American “Scientifiction” magazine years before.

Out of the Silent Planet drew its influence from the stories of H.G. Wells, in particular The First Men in the Moon. In a brief preface, Lewis apologizes for “certain slighting references” to these stories which he says were made “purely for dramatic purposes” and adds, “The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H.G. Wells’s fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them.”

Dr. Elwin Ransom is a professor of philology who is hiking around the English countryside on his vacation. Lewis modeled Ransom on Tolkien, who was also a philologist.(Tolkien, it is said, modeled the character of Gandalf on Lewis; at least, Tolkien said, Gandalf shared Lewis’s sharp temper and his bushy eyebrows.). He comes across an old school chum named Devine who is working with a scientist named Weston on some sort of secret project which strikes Ransom as vaguely suspicious.

Devine is the sort of oily, shallow, chummy type that Terry-Thomas used to play in the movies. He had a cynical worldliness in school that Ransom admired when he was young but which Ransom soon outgrew. Devine has changed very little since then, and it isn't until after Ransom has accepted his old chum’s hospitality that it occurs to him that he really didn't like him all that much.

Weston is a physicist. “Has Einstein on toast and drinks a pint of Schrödinger’s blood for breakfast,” Devine explains. Weston is essentially modeled after the Late Victorian Materialist Scientist. He is much like Professor Challenger from The Lost World, only without the homicidal rages and the endearing frailties. Much later, in a draft of a response Lewis started to an critical review of the trilogy by J.B.S. Haldane, Lewis confessed that Weston was a caricature who seemed more interested in Social Darwinism than Physics and that Lewis felt he was one of his least believable characters. Still, Weston is not without some scruples and expresses some regrets about involving Ransom in their plans. “He is, after all, human. The boy was really almost a – a preparation. Still, he’s only an individual, and probably a quite useless one.”

Ransom suspects that the two are up to something shady, and if this were a horror movie the audience would be shouting at him not to accept the gin and tonic Devine fixes for him in the other room. But the Old School Tie overrides his premonition of danger and Ransom finds himself drugged and carried off into the strange round structure in the back of Devine’s house.

He awakens to find himself on board a spacecraft. In a passage which post-Apollo readers probably find difficult to visualize – at least I do – it takes a while for Ransom to comprehend that the huge orb he sees through the craft’s window is not the Moon, swollen to enormous proportions, but the planet Earth..
When Ransom demands some answers, Weston’s answer is both arrogant and evasive:

“As to how we do it – I suppose you mean how the space-ship works – there’s not good your asking that. Unless you were one of the four or five real physicists now living you couldn't understand; and if there were any chance of your understanding you certainly wouldn't be told. If it makes you happy to repeat words that don’t mean anything – which is, in fact, what unscientific people want when they ask for an explanation—you may say we work by exploiting the less observed properties of solar radiation.”

Many years later, Lewis participated in a round-table discussion on science fiction with writers Kingsley Amis and Brian Aldiss for the British magazine SF Horizons. One of them brought up the fact that scientists had actually devised a theoretical type of space travel which would utilize a “solar sail” to catch radiation from the sun. Lewis admitted with some embarrassment that Weston’s explanation was pure technobabble, that he simply wrote something he hoped sounded impressive. He noted that in his first space book he had his hero taken to another planet in a spaceship, but in his second, where he felt a little more confident, he had his hero carried by angels. It says much about Lewis that he never really believed in Weston’s space-ship, but he did believe in angels.

Weston tells Ransom that they are en route to the planet Malacandra. “There isn't a planet called Malacandra,” Ransom protests. “I am giving it its real name, not the name given it by terrestrial astronomers.” The planet is in fact Mars, but Lewis does not explicitly confirm this until the very end. As to why they have kidnapped Ransom, Weston will only say that “small claims must give way to the great” and that abducting him was “no idea of ours. We are only obeying orders.” That is all Weston will say on the subject.

Lewis gives scant description to the space-craft. Unlike Nemo in the Nautilus or Seaton in the Skylark, Weston does not give Ransom a tour of his craft – it does not even seem to have a name and one gets the impression that Weston is too prosaic to give it one. Some details of space travel Lewis gets wrong, as where he gives Ransom a kind of metal girdle hung with enormous weights to mitigate “the unmanageable lightness of his body”.

One point he gets unexpectedly right. Ransom is surprised by the brightness of outer space. “I always thought space was dark and cold,” he says. “Forgotten the sun?” Weston replies. Without the earth’s atmosphere to block them, the rays of the sun, and even of the stars, are so much more intense.

He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. … No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens…

Lying in bed, looking up at the stars as thick as daisies, he imagines the ‘sweet influence’ of the stars piercing his body as if he were “a second Danaë”, recalling the Greek myth of the maiden ravished by Zeus in a shower of golden light.

It’s not until a couple weeks into the voyage that Ransom overhears part of a conversation between Weston and Devine discussing why they need Ransom. Devine makes an ominous reference to something called a sorn.

Again Ransom heard the indistinct noise of Weston’s voice. 

‘How should I know?’ said Devine. ‘It may be some sort of chief; much more likely a mumbo-jumbo.’ 

This time came a very short utterance form the control-room: apparently a question. Devine answered at once. 

‘It would explain why he was wanted.’ 

Weston asked him something more. 

‘Human sacrifice, I suppose. At least it wouldn't be human from their point of view; you know what I mean.”

NEXT:  Arrival on Malacandra; Meeting the Hrossa; and the Sorns

The Demolished Man part 6: Demolition

Ben Reich is on top of the worlds. He has eliminated his biggest business rival, Craye D'Courtney, and is in a position to absorb D'Courtney's company; he has waged an intricate chess game against the telepathic detective investigating the crime; and he has just learned that he has won:  the police have closed the case against him.

Oh yes, he still has a few problems: he still has nightmares about a menacing Man With No Face And there's the small issue of somebody trying to kill him. But all that pales before the realization that he is finally in the clear.


Ben Reich has gotten away with murder.

Lincoln Powell, 1st Class Esper and Prefect of the Police Psychotic Division has persuaded the Esper Guild Council to hold an emergency meeting. Although he does not have enough Objective (that is, non-psionic) Evidence to build a court case, he knows that Reich is guilty of murder. What's more, he has come to the realization that Reich not just a murderer, but a threat to the Esper community, and to humanity as a whole.

We have already seen that Reich has been simultaneously supporting a smear campaign to stir up anti-Esper feelings in the non-Esper populations as well as financially backing the League of Esper Patriots, a self-interested splinter group opposed to some of the Esper Guild's policies. Either of these by themselves could severely damage the Guild as a political entity and the Esper community as a whole. But the danger Reich poses goes beyond that.

Reich is about to become a Galactic focal point ... A crucial link between the positive past and the potential future. Powell argues. Reich has the money, power and force of personality to shape the pattern of human culture. And he is a sociopath.

Look at Reich's position in time and space. Will not his beliefs become the world's belief? Will not his reality become the world's reality? Is he not, in his critical position of power, energy, and intellect, a sure road to utter destruction?

To stop Reich, Powell proposes a measure called Mass Cathexis, a dangerous technique which has never been successfully accomplished. Guild President T'sung is reluctant to authorize the attempt. "You're too valuable to be destroyed, Powell." But Powell is willing to take the risk. The fate of humanity may hang in the balance. He insists on a vote, and the Guild grants his request.

Powell returns home and tells Mary Noyes what he's resolved to do. "There's a chance it won't kill me. Oh ... One reminder. Lab wants a brain autopsy soon as I'm dead ... if I die." But before he goes, he needs to see Barbara one last time.

Barbara D'Courtney has almost completed the regression therapy the doctors instituted to heal the psychic trauma of witnessing her father's murder. As her subconscious has been slowly recovering, Her conscious mind was regressed to that of an infant and allowed to develop back to maturity. Her mind is currently that of an adolescent and is trying to come to grips with her feelings about Powell. "Do you feel like a father to me? Because I don't feel like a daughter to you."

Complicating the matter further, Powell is in love with her. He's been trying to avoid having to deal with this situation; that was a big reason why he recruited his friend Mary to help babysit. Now there's no more avoiding it.

Mary telepathically urges him to admit the truth. "She's a woman and she's in love with you. You're in love with her. Please, Linc, give yourself a chance." Powell reminds her that the Guild won't allow him to marry a normal; the best he can offer Barbara -- provided he survives -- is an extramarital affair. "She'll settle for that. She'll be grateful to settle for that. Ask me. I know." Mary also loves Powell and would have liked to marry him; but as much as he likes her, Powell would not consent to a loveless marriage. Now Mary pleads with him to consider a marriageless love, for Barbara's sake.

Except that Powell expects to die very shortly. Despite his bravado, he knows his chances of surviving the Mass Cathexis are very slim. He doesn't want to leave Barbara with "Nothing but a half a memory of half a love."

Next to his telepathic talent, Powell's greatest asset is his ability to lie with the utmost sincerity; the part of his personality he calls "Dishonest Abe". And so he does. "Baby! Baby! Baby! What makes you think I'm in love with you that way? I'm not. I've never been."

"No!" Barbara bursts into tears. "Your face is lying. It's ... It's hateful! ... Oh go away. Why don't you go away?"

Mary takes Barbara off in a cab to the Hospital. As he watches them leave, he senses the Mass Cathaxis beginning. As he requested, every esper in the city is feeding their latent psychic energy into his brain.

The energy came in torrents now. From each Esper in the city, a trickle of latent power that merged into a stream, a river, a swirling sea of Mass Cathexis directed toward Powell, tuned to Powell. He opened all blocks and absorbed it all. His nervous system superheterodyned and screamed and a turbine in his mind wirled faster and faster with a mounting intolerable whine. 

... 

...So Powell fought to absorb that fearful torrent, to Capitalize that latent energy, to Cathectize and direct it toward the Demolition of Reich before it was too late, too late, too late, too late, too late...

Reich wakes up from another dream. Not a nightmare this time, a strange dream full of mathematical symbols and commands; a dream so compelling that in waking up he feels like he has fallen asleep again; that the dream was the reality.

Duffy Wyg& is with him, the blonde flirt who wrote the deathless "Tenser, Said the Tensor" jingle. She found him lying unconscious in front of the police station and brought him home. "How could I pass up the opportunity? It's the only way I can get you into my bed."

Reich is starting to get a handle on his thoughts again. Where was he? Yes, he was on top of the world. "Drunk? Sure, I'm drunk... Why shouldn't I be drunk? I've licked D'Courtney. I've licked Powell. I'm forty years old. I've got sixty years of owning the whole world ahead of me. Yes, Duffy ... the whole damned world!" He goes into a joyous, intoxicated rant. "How'd you like to start a dynasty with me, Duffy?" He's going to take over D'Courtney's company; then he'll take over all the other smaller corporations. He'll devour them all. He throws open the window and shouts at the city skyline.

"You out there!" Reich roared. "Can you hear me? All of you... sleeping and dreaming. You'll dream my dreams from now on! You'll --"

Then he notices. There are no stars in the sky.

"Where are the stars?" he demands. "Where are the what?" Duffy replies. She doesn't know what he's talking about.

He runs into the street and looks up in the sky. He can see the moon, a brilliant point of light which must be Mars, and another one which must be Jupiter. But when he asks people on passing by where the stars went, they act like he's crazy. The sky's always looked like that.

A friendly cabbie suggests that maybe he just imagined that there used to be stars in the sky, and recommends visiting the Kingston Hospital. Reich tries to get a grip on himself. He has been under a lot of stress... "Maybe... Maybe you're right." He regains his confidence. "What the hell do I care about the stars! ... I've got the world!"

He goes to his office and calls a meeting. He announces that he intends to commence the acquisition of D'Courtney Cartel's holdings on Mars. His staff look at him like he has two heads. They've never heard of the cartel, or of Mars.

He goes to the company's records. The files contain no reference to any other planets. He goes to Wikipedia; (okay, not Wikipedia, but a computerized library database) and asks about the universe. The computer tells him that the Universe consists of the Earth and the Sun. But what about the planets? "There is the earth," the computer answers. And the moon? "There is no moon."

"Reich took a deep trembling breath. "We'll try it again. Go back to the sun." 

The sun appeared again in the crystal. "The sun is the largest collection of matter known to astronomers," the canned voice began. Suddenly it stopped. Click-pause-click. The picture of the sun began to fade slowly. The voice spoke. "There is no sun."

Now Reich is growing frantic. Bit by bit, his world is disappearing. He tries to buy tickets to Paris. There is no Paris. He goes to the police, but they've never heard of D'Courtney or Powell or anything. He goes to Maria Beaumont's home, the place where he committed the murder, but he sees nothing but barren desolation where the mansion once stood. Piece by piece, reality slips away from him until there is only Reich...

...and the Man With No Face.

And at last, he looks deeply into that face which he has been fleeing from for so long and sees... his own.

And D'Courtney's.

Both faces, merged together, blending into one.

It is his father.

The man tells Reich that it has all been a test. The entire universe of his experience has been an illusion, a puzzle for him to solve, a Cosmic Game. Which he lost.

"I conquered it. I owned it."
"And you failed to solve it. We'll never know that the solution is, but it's not theft, terror, hatred, lust, murder, rapine. You failed , and it's all been abolished, disbanded..."

For him it ends, and there is nothing.

Except...

Reich and Powell are found the next morning; Reich curled up in a fetal position and Powell gripping on to him, barely alive. He survived the Mass Cathexis. As the Guild's best esper doctors take care of Powell, Reich is taken to Kingston Hospital.

A week later, Powell is feeling well enough to visit his boss, the Police Commissioner. Reich has been tried, found guilty and scheduled for Demolition. Old Man Mose, the Prosecuting Computer, was right all along. Reich's motive in killing D'Courtney never was profit. D'Courtney was secretly Reich's father. That's why D'Courtney had terrible feelings of unresolved guilt; not about his daughter, but about his unacknowledged son. That's why D'Courtney truly did want to reconcile with Reich. Subconsciously, Reich knew this and hated his father for it. That was why he wanted to kill D'Courtney. And yet, a part of his self-conscious rebelled against his murderous impulses. That was who the Man With No Name really was; Reich's own conscience. And when Reich succeeded in killing his father, his subconscious tried to punish himself by planting the bombs while Reich was asleep. Reich's true motivations were so deeply buried, that he could not even admit them to himself.   That was why he misinterpreted D'Courtney's coded message.

The only way Powell could get to that truth was to create an intensely realistic illusion in Reich's mind and strip it down, layer by layer, until there was nothing left but Reich and his guilt; The Man With No Face.

The Commissioner is impressed. "You've done a phenomenal job, Powell. Really phenomenal. ... It must be a wonderful thing to be an Esper."

Powell paused at the door and looked at Crabbe. "Would you be happy to live your life in a hospital, Commissioner?" 

"A hospital?" 

"That's where we live ... All of us. In the psychiatric ward. Without escape ... without refuge. Be grateful you're not a peeper, sir. Be grateful that you only see the outward man. Be grateful that you never see the passions, the hatreds, the jealousies, the malice, the sickness ... Be grateful you rarely see the frightening truth in people. The world will be a wonderful place when everyone's a peeper and everyone's adjusted ... But until then, be grateful you're blind."

He goes to visit Barbara at the hospital. She's an adult now; her treatment is complete and her inner and outer minds are once again in synch. She still loves him. She's aware that he can never marry her, but she doesn't care. She's willing to settle for being his mistress. My, how they tiptoe around this! But she's willing.

Powell laughs, and tells her she won't have to settle for anything. He reminds her of the night of the murder, when she came to her father because she heard him calling out to her. Except her father was incapable of calling! He was sick and had advanced throat cancer; he could barely whisper. Barbara must have sensed his desperate thoughts telepathically. She is a latent peeper, and therefore Powell is free to marry her. Okay, this seems like an awfully convenient happy ending; but Bester did plant the clues ahead of time: her actions on the night of the murder; the intensity of the shock she experienced; her ability to recognize when Powell was lying to her.

While he is at the hospital, Powell runs into Reich one last time; a screaming, twitching mockery of a human. He is undergoing Demolition. His brain is slowly being chemically erased, much as Powell did with the illusion of the stars, until it is a blank slate. The process is a long one; the doctor supervising him says he will be ready for rebirth in a year. This is the punishment the State metes against its worst offenders; horrifying an ghastly. And yet...

"Three or four hundred years ago, cops used to catch people like Reich just to kill them. Capital punishment, they called it." 

"You're kidding." 

"Scout's honor." 

"But it doesn't make sense. If a man's got the talent and the guts to buck society, he's obviously above average. You want to hold on to him. You straighten him out and turn him into a plus value. Why throw him away? Do that enough and all you've got left are the sheep." 

"I don't know. Maybe in those days they wanted sheep."

I still find Reich's rehabilitation to be disturbing. Is it really better than the alternative? I'm just not comfortable with the State having the power to erase a man's mind like that. But maybe, if Powell's dream came true and everybody was a peeper, it would bring a level of transparency to government that would actually make it trustworthy.

If I had written the novel, I think I'd be tempted to end it with Reich in a straitjacket, sitting in a padded cell and humming "Tenser, said the tensor..." But despite the Demolition, despite the terrifying identity-loss Reich must endure, Bester's view of this world is on the whole optimistic.

The line Powell fed the Commissioner earlier about peepers being trapped in the psycho ward, was another of Dishonest Abe's lies, calculated to gain the Commissioners sympathy and ease some of the tension between the two men. Now as he gives Reich a small gift and receives in return a confused glimpse of thanks in Reich's chaotic mind, Powell reacts with joy.

"Listen," he cried in exaltation. "Listen, normals! You must learn what it is. You must learn how it is. You must tear the barriers down. You must tear the veils away. We see the truth you cannot see ... That there is noting in man but love and faith, courage and kindness, generosity and sacrifice. All else is only the barrier of your blindness. One day we'll all be mind to mind and heart to heart..."