![\"Book](\"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/bsgfx\/thespacetrilogy.jpg\")
I got this book last year for Father’s Day. At a May potluck, I spotted some friends’ son reading some C.S. Lewis, and I asked if it was the Space Trilogy–maybe Perelandra? But it was not. I admitted then that I’d read Out of the Silent Planet<\/em> in middle school–maybe it was on Mrs. Pickering’s paperback rack with When Worlds Collide<\/em> (I recounted that when I later read the sequel After Worlds Collide<\/a><\/em>), but that I’d not read the others. So my beautiful wife ordered a used copy for me, and I started reading it right away. Last June.<\/p>\nIn Out of the Silent Planet<\/em>, we’ve got an almost rocket jockey story, but it’s British and it’s Lewis, so it’s setting a Christian allegory. A university professor, Ransom, is kidnapped by two men who have built a rocket to go to Mars, where they plan to sacrifice him to some martians. He escapes with the help of the Martian life forms who live in the valleys and gorges where air remains. It’s 158 pages. Rocket jockey-sized. Also, Ransom learns about the powerful beings who rule the planets and angel-like creatures who exist, but Earth’s equivalent has been quarantined because he’s turned bad.<\/p>\n In Paralandra<\/em>, Ransom is later summoned to Venus (called Paralandra by the extraterrestrial powers) where he finds a beautiful, but green, woman who is looking for her King, and they’re going to start a humanish race on Venus. One of the kidnappers from Out of the Silent Planet<\/em> shows up, possessed by demonic forces, and Ransom must do battle with him to prevent him from tempting the Queen from violating the one rule she has–not to avoid eating an apple, but to avoid sleeping overnight on I have mentioned in book reports over the last year that I was having trouble digging into That Hideous Strength<\/em>. It weighs in at 380 pages, and not rocket jockey stuff. It’s like a British Christian Ayn Rand novel with a guest appearance by Gandalf. In it, a Scientific Organization moves in on a bucolic college and its town, first offering to buy an undeveloped wood and then muscling into the town with its private police force. The book focuses, as much as it does on any characters, on a married couple: The man is a professor at the university who is tempted into a position with NICE, the invading Scientific (and ultimately demonic forces); the woman is a modern (ca 1940s) woman who starts having vivid predictive or clairvoyant dreams and ends up reluctantly joining up with the saintly crowd, led by The Director, a saintly figure with a wounded foot that won’t heal (revealed to be Ransom later in the book, and to be honest, it had been so long since I read Paralanadra<\/em> before I got to the character, I’d forgotten the foot thing). Eventually, we get a sense of the demonic forces behind NICE amid some expository text, and then a bang up climax. Apparently, the MacGuffin ultimately is that NICE wants to dig up Merlin, who is in a state of suspension beneath the wood they bought and\/or the university, but he lets himself out first and joins the saintly side to defeat the forces of darkness. All the almost-characterized bad guys get what’s coming to them, and the book ends with a rather long denouement where couples are united in love matches, including the main couple who are to rediscover their marriage in a more Christly fashion, and Ransom goes back to Venus.<\/p>\n I mean, I say British Christian Ayn Rand novel<\/em> because it’s wordy with long philosophical conversations and interior monologues, especially as the professor worries about whether he’s in the out group or the in group at the university and NICE. The first part of the novel seems swamped by university intrigue, and then we get instruction as the head of NICE police and various officials tell him how to navigate the Party, or allude to how to navigate the Party, and…. Well, it’s awful wordy. But, I guess, it’s a novel of ideas. I have seen allusions to it here and there before I mentioned it at the potluck last year and as late as…. what, last week?<\/p>\n But I think I will prefer Lewis’s nonfiction work. When I was a kid, I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe<\/em> and Prince Caspian<\/em>, but even though I checked The Voyage of the Dawn Treader<\/em> out of the Milwaukee Public Library, I don’t think I got through the first chapter of it.<\/p>\n So I’m glad to have read it, although I did not rather enjoy the reading of it. And I had to apologize to my wife for repeatedly saying what a chore it was to finish the book; after all, this was slagging on a gift, and it was definitely in poor taste.<\/p>\n OH: And Lewis alludes to other fantasy works; I guess the Numinor talk alludes to Tolkein’s N\u00famenor, so I didn’t get it (I’m also not that<\/em> into the Middle Earth stuff, although I did read the The Lord of the Rings<\/em> trilogy in 2011<\/a>).<\/p>\n But I did get this reference in the long denouement:<\/p>\n That same afternoon Mother Dimble and the three girls were upstairs in the big room which occupied nearly the whole top floor of one wing at the Manor, and which the Director called the Wardrobe. If you had glanced in, you would have thought for one moment that they were not in a room at all but in some kind of forest–a tropical forest glowing with bright colours.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n It would be an allusion to The Chronicles of Narnia<\/em>–but they were published a couple of years later.<\/p>\n As would be the source of an allusion on the following page:<\/p>\n “Gor!” she said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Probably not–that series would not start for 20 years–but it was funny to note.<\/p>\n At any rate, the book side table is looking almost bare now with only the Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/em> (started in 2018), the second book of The Story of Civilization<\/em> (started in 2023), the first volume of the Masterplots<\/em> series (started last year), and another small hundred-year-old collection of Pope that I have discovered after<\/em> I found this additional copy<\/a> and wherein I will read the additional poems not found in the hundred-year-old textbook I finished last month<\/a> (including “Essay on Criticism”) and count as a whole book since The Space Trilogy<\/em> only counts as one book, and I have some catching up to do since I’m only at 51 books for the year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I got this book last year for Father’s Day. At a May potluck, I spotted some friends’ son reading some C.S. Lewis, and I asked if it was the Space Trilogy–maybe Perelandra? But it was not. I admitted then that I’d read Out of the Silent Planet in middle school–maybe it was on Mrs. Pickering’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-report","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35446"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35446\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35447,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35446\/revisions\/35447"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}dry land<\/strike> (sorry, dry land is Waterworld<\/em>) fixed land (most of Venus, er, Paralandra is covered in floating islands). He does, but at personal cost: A wound on his heel which does not heal. He then returns to earth. Paralandra<\/em> weighs in at 190 pages–a little longer, and a bit talkier–so much of the early part of it is just lush descriptions of the strange world with not much happening.<\/p>\n