Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry read C.S. Lewis’ The Allegory of Love and became enamored with the author’s style, which he says is a dangerous thing. So he picked up Out of the Silent Planet and loved it. The other two books? Perelandra, “the most disappointing of the three” and That Hideous Strength, “clearly the strangest.”
“The overall impression is that Lewis’s heart was never into science-fiction. He decided to get into it for some reason–maybe he perceived the same lack as I did, maybe he wanted a challenge, maybe he lost a bet–and poured all his ideas and energy into the first book . . .”
Will Duquette took a different approach. “Lewis was writing at a time when little was known about Mars and the other planets, and one could still reasonably write about Martians; and it was also a time when it was assumed in much of science fiction that mankind would conquer the stars and would bring a Wellsian secular humanism with them. His great question was, is that really the right thing for us to do? To export our wars and politics and brokenness to the heavens? This theme appears in Out of the Silent Planet, but receives its full treatment in Perelandra.”
Funny how tastes vary. I always thought Perelandra was the deepest book of the three.
I should add that Lewis certainly was into SF. He read a lot of it.
My impression is that Perelandra is the most admired, and most loved of the three among readers.
Until I read Perelandra (in my thirties), I’d never really thought of Adam and Eve as people and what it might have been like to live as unfallen humans. I had thought of them essentially as theoretical propositions of some sort. That alone made the series worth the read for me.
What some readers call “preaching” in Perelandra is Ransom’s side of a vigorous debate between himself as a struggling defender of truth, and the devil. Ransom can’t do as Jesus did in His temptation and cite the Old Testament, because Perelandra (Venus) has no Scriptures. Myself, I think the debate is a tour de force. Perhaps that betrays in me some defective sense of literary decorum. Or maybe the critic who objected to the “preaching” lacks relish for the ancient (back to Plato’s Socrates at least, and the largest portion of the Book of Job) literary form of the debate.