XPost: rec.arts.books, rec.arts.sf.written
From: commodorejohn@gmail.com
On Tue, 03 Feb 2026 07:05:32 +0200
Steve Hayes wrote:
> > "That Hideous Strength" is kind of a mess, but an audacious one.
> > His other two "Space Trilogy" books are fine indeed, and all three
> > had a major influence on me as a writer. A fascinating blend of
> > old-school "planetary romance," theology/mysticism, and social
> > commentary.
>
> As you can see from my ordering, I like "That Hideous Strength" best.
> If you take "genre" beyond the publishers and booksellers ones, and
> divide things into subgenres as some like to do, then it comes closer
> to the genre of Charles Williams's novels, which I also like, but are
> definitely fantasy rather than science fiction, and that is the
> element that predominates in THS.
>
> Back to Lewis, the scene at the end of "Out of the Silent Planet" when
> Ransom tries to translate Weston's bloviating for the Oyarsa of
> Malacandra is a magnificent send-up of colonialism, and Devine, as
> I've already mentioned, was probably based on Cecil Rhodes, a
> budinessman turned politician, one of whose spiritual descendants is
> undoubtedly Donald Trump.
Nitpicks aside (Lewis himself admitted to having an "expository demon,"
and my biggest complaint with THS is that there are a couple crucial
points where he should be showing rather than *telling* - but then he
does a fine job of showing in his depiction of a man sliding into
collaboration with Evil by inches,) I really do enjoy it. Bringing
planetary archangels and Arthuriana into a proto-Orwellian sci-fi
political thriller is *exactly* my kind of gonzo genre-busting.
(Thanks for the tip on Williams; will have to check into his work...)
And it's felt uncomfortably timely, the last 10-15 years; the vintage
colonialism skewered in OSP seemed like a distant thing to me as a
young reader (though not nearly so much as I learned more of the side
of 20th-century history the Powers That Be don't like to talk about,
later in life,) but the cooption of institutions by authoritarians and
transformation of an everyday setting into a police state was familiar
from "Animal Farm," even before I discovered the throughline from THS
to "1984," and it's going to feel much, much closer to home the next
time I revisit it :/
> For more on that see here:
>
>
> or here:
>
That's an interesting perspective - I confess that my familiarity with
South African history is limited, and I'd noticed but hadn't really
processed the reference to Rhodes on my last reading. The bit about a
national "haunting" has stuck with me for years (there's something
*essential* in there, and one day I'll figure out how to capture it in
my own work;) all the moreso now that I'm watching the fractures which
latticed my own country since before my grandparents were born turn
into seismic rifts...
(That Chesterton quote is *savage* - and, again, eerily reminiscent.)
Interesting take on "Prince Caspian," too - that's one I enjoyed as a
kid, but didn't fully appreciate 'til I'd grown up enough to understand
what the smaller oppressions of confining but "normal" society can look
like next to the Big Things the main plot is concerned with - that the
liberation from a dreary school and lifeless curriculum isn't just a
whimsical aside thrown in "for the kiddies," but part and parcel with
the main theme of the book.
(And it has been *endlessly* amusing, over the years, to hear so many
starchy, moralizing parents of "Evangelical" conservative persuasion
laud a series that has this liberation from conformity accomplished
with Bacchus and his nymphs in the procession...!)
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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