C.S. Lewis on Science Fiction

On Tuesday, September 27, 2022, I made an entry called "Fantasy Against the Machine." I began with this sentence:

If you're looking for an example of the antipathy that fantasy might have towards science fiction, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) would be a place to start.

I base that on ideas and themes from Lewis' Space Trilogy, especially That Hideous Strength, but also Perelandra (1943) and this passage:

He [Weston] was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction," in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite--the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species--a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. (Chapter 6)

Perelandra is the second book in the trilogy and my favorite. The first is Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The silent planet of the title is Earth. It's called that because Earth, its people being "bent," is under quarantine so that we may not spread our fallen condition among the stars.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis pretty well skewered H.G. Wells by casting him as a comical character and a stooge for the plans and schemes of some truly rotten people, the kind of people who actually exist in real life and are now at the heads of government and industry throughout the Western world. (You could say that the communists in China are a pretty mild threat compared to them.) Lewis set all of this up despite his note at the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet:

Note: Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic purposes. 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.

In any case, I have a feeling that Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy, in part, as a response to a distinctly Wellsian brand of science fiction, perhaps especially to ideas expressed in the film Things to Come (1936), which ends, of course, with a scene in which the people of Earth, in all of our pride and ambition and grand plans, attempt to break out of what Lewis called "God's quarantine."

Some people consider the Space Trilogy to be works of science fiction. I'm not so sure of that. I like a tighter definition of the term. I might call it instead space fantasy or science fantasy. In some ways, it has more in common with weird fiction than it does with science fiction. The resurrection of Merlin in That Hideous Strength is an example of a weird-fictional versus a science-fictional event. Over all, there is an emphasis on the spiritual and supernatural rather than on the material and scientific. It's worth noting that Lewis subtitled this last book in his trilogy "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups."

On September 29, 2022, reader Carrington Dixon left a comment on my entry "Fantasy Against the Machine":

I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that Lewis "had some antipathy towards science fiction," just because he makes Wells one of the villains of That Hideous Strength. After all, several of Lewis' works are generally considered to be science fiction. To get a better understanding of how Lewis regarded science fiction you might read his essay, "On Science Fiction." I have it in the book Of Other Worlds; it may be available in other collections. I should say that generally he liked sf; although, he liked some kinds more than others.

Lewis admitted in his introductory note that he enjoyed Wells' fantasies and owed them a debt. I imagine that he read other fantasies--i.e., stories of science fiction--and enjoyed them, too. And so I read his essay "On Science Fiction," as Mr. Dixon recommended, and I find that Lewis did indeed read and enjoy some science fiction, but he seems to have included that genre (or those genres) in a wider category of all kinds of fantasy fiction. He also broke science fiction down into several types, what he called "sub-species," and examined them one by one. It's all really interesting but entirely too short. I wish that Lewis had brought his wide reading and erudition to bear and had written at length on the topic. But we have what we have from him instead and will have to be satisfied with that. In any case, it's clear that Lewis liked some of his sub-species and did not like others. I would like to thank Carrington Dixon for his comment and his recommendation.

So, I guess what I should have written is that C.S. Lewis seems to have had some antipathy towards the science-fictional idea of progress, also to a hard-scientific or materialist approach to the subject matter of science fiction. But then he was skeptical of the real-world idea of progress anyway, perhaps more accurately, antipathetic towards the efforts of the progressives and materialists among us. Maybe what he was looking for more than anything in his reading is a moral, spiritual, or human dimension in fantasy and science fiction.

In his essay, Lewis wrote: "Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction." Presumably he was referring to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which began seventy-three years ago this month under the editorship of Anthony Boucher (a fellow Christian) and J. Francis McComas. (The occasion was the 100-year anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe.) In regards to that magazine and the kinds of stories it published, Lewis wrote:

In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about space-travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our due. The last sub-species of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up. [. . .]

     In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a 'machine' in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. [These things happened of course in his Space Trilogy.] Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter. When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical delusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it already existed in the common mind.

It seems clear to me that Lewis was writing here about what we would call the Lost Worlds type of story and its extensions (which go into outer space), perhaps more broadly science fantasy and not strictly science fiction. And he mentioned H. Rider Haggard in his discussion (though not in the parts I have quoted above). Significantly, in beginning this part of "On Science Fiction," Lewis wrote: "I turn at last to that sub-species in which alone I myself am greatly interested." And I will emphasize the line:

I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best.

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By the way, in his discussion of what he called the Eschatological sub-species of science fiction--for example Wells' Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End--Lewis used the F-word. He wrote:

Stories of this kind may explain the hardly disguised political rancor which I thought I detected in one article on science fiction. The insinuation was that those who read or wrote it were probably Fascists.

And:

The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.

So that flinging around of the word and charge of "Fascist!" and "Fascism!" is old, old. I should add that it usually comes from people who supposedly look to the future, not the past, and want new things, if there can indeed be anything new under the sun. Maybe that's why some people read and write science fiction: to get out from under the sun, to go beyond the sun into new things.

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Thanks again to Carrington Dixon for reading and writing, also for his recommendation. Thanks also to everyone who reads and finds interest in this blog. I hope to continue it for a long time to come, and I hope you will stay with me as I go.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley