I don’t read C.S. Lewis as much as I ought to. I don’t like C.S. Lewis as much as I ought to. So I’m remedying this by reading through “The Joyful Christian” a collection of 127 readings taken from the big guy’s writings. I’m already glad that I’ve picked up this collection. Lewis was a product of his time, but a rare product, like a white tiger or a potato shaped like Richard Nixon. He was a popularizer of Christianity, but a type of Christianity that never quite took root in America. I always wonder why evangelicals like him so much when 1.) He smoked! 2.) He drank! 3.) He wasn’t even a Reverend! Lewis had a special love for science fiction. A strange obsession when you consider most of his education focused on literature of the past. Well, he is certainly a better writer and thinker than I am so I’ll shut up and give you a snippet of his prose from “The World’s Last Night.”
C.S. Lewis writes:
“I … fear the practical, not the theoretical, problems which will arise if ever we meet rational creatures which are not human. Against them we shall, if we can, commit all the crimes we have already committed against creatures certainly human but differing from us in features and pigmentation; and the starry heavens will become an object to which good men can look up only with feelings of intolerable guilt, agonizing pity, and burning shame.”
As I write this I’m imagining C.S. Lewis sitting down for a chat with Billy Sunday and Descartes. They might each feel they are in the presence of not “rational creatures which are not human,” but human creatures which are not rational.
Well, CS Lewis is just what British evangelicals like, and are like. Well, most of us don’t smoke now, but that’s because of the known health risks rather than because it was ever considered especially sinful. And some of us might think Lewis a little liberal in some areas. But we have no real difficulty treating him as a hero.
I don’t think it strange that Lewis loved science fiction but studied the literature of the past. Tell me, are the Narnia stories science fiction? In some senses, yes, although in prototypical science fiction people use technology rather than magic to explore strange worlds. (But then wasn’t Lewis’ magician, the one who had the nephew, really a technologist? He was trying to brew up a chemical mixture that would have the effects he was looking for just as much as the NASA chemists blending rocket fuel etc are.) Yet the Narnia stories are also very much rooted in the literature of the past. This is even clearer with Tolkien: The Lord of the Rings is clearly based on ancient Finnish sagas. But there is also a huge amount of folklore in the Narnia stories – and even in Lewis’ supposed science fiction writings, especially Perelandra/Voyage to Venus and That Hideous Strength. The kind of fantasy genre which Tolkien and Lewis pioneered bridges the gap between ancient legends and science fiction, replacing the technological fantasies so popular in the 1960s with more mystical and magical ones which fit a postmodern era with a renewed interest in spirituality. The genius of Lewis and Tolkien was both to anticipate this and to give the genre a more Christianised basis than it might have had if it had originated in New Age teachings.
You’re spot on Peter. Science fiction isn’t just about blasters and time travel. Asimov, Heinlen and the rest were great at writing stories that seemed like normal life on earth and twisting it a bit to make you think. The Martian Chronicles is such an example and one of the treasured books of my childhood.
I rather enjoyed Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles (actually, I listened to a few chapters on X Minus One on Old-Time Radio, before I could read), but I prefer the much earlier Chronicles of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Burroughs, of Tarzan fame, combined anthropological refrences and bad science with characters of classical and modern values. He used Sci-Fi for what I would proclaim to be its purpose: to remove the audience from their own world in order to reveal the good and evil which everyday life allows them to overlook.
Anticipating the shift away from racist thought, and even the downfall of orientalism, Burroughs went beyond the “noble savage” to find that even when the racist opinions about the characters in his stories were generally correct, they always proved themselves inadiquate. In fact, I think that each race had a hero of some sort.
He had his problems, most of them born of his own cultural background, but considering the time period (1911-1941), his works showed a remarkable ability to sympathize with the marginalized peoples of the universe.
Ty, thanks for comments about Burroughs’ works. But surely much of what you wrote about this is also applicable to CS Lewis’ later Out of the Silent Planet (1938). Of course Lewis may have read and borrowed from Burroughs.
I note from the Wikipedia article about Lewis’ book that “The concepts of space and other planets in this novel are largely taken from medieval cosmology.” So again science fiction and old literature meet.
It’s worth mentioning that the science fiction imaginings of the quote in this post were being used to make a point about our behavior in the very real world.