Out of the Silent Planet - Book 20

Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis is the first book in his Space Trilogy.  It was written back in 1938 so I found Lewis' fanciful dealing with the physics of space interesting and entertaining.    This book fulfills the 'outer space' square in my Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks Bingo Challenge.

The main character in the book is a English philologist named Dr. Ransom.  Lewis has fun with this, developing another language system for the creatures he peoples Malacandra with.  Ransom uses his expertise to learn to speak to the natives.

The story begins while on a walking vacation through the English countryside.  Ransom stumbles on an old unlikeable classmate of his and another fellow, Dr. Weston, in the middle of a dark secret.  He winds up getting kidnapped to go along with them as they fly to what we realize later is Mars.  The whole technological aspect of how they take off is deftly ignored by Lewis.  The description of the flight and then the actual topography and biology of Malacandra (Mars) is really interesting.

Once on the planet, Ransom escapes and is succored by one of the three species of intelligent life on the planet.  It's a complex story with all sorts of implications and observations on good and evil.  The creatures of Malacandra never experienced a fall from grace.  Even though they know their planet is dying, they have no fear.  Earth is the only place in the universe where people are 'bent,' the Malacandrian way of saying 'sinful.'  

Ransom is not as bent as the other two men: Devine who is full of greed for the gold found on Malacandra, and Weston who has some sort of delusional monomania for discovering a new home to save the humans of the earth.  Ransom thus can see clearly where the others can not.  They impute danger and ideas to the creatures of Malacandra that aren't there.  Weston, the supposedly smarter of the two, is actually the worst at never overcoming his prejudices, so convinced is he that he is right in everything.

There's a whole category of beings that I never figured out if they were actually angels or just angel-like.  I found this very insightful analysis of the book.  I disagree about the meaningless of the suspense during the ride back to Earth.  I thought it showed Ransom's changed response to his possibly impending death and how the other two men, so deformed by sin, so bent, didn't change at all.

For many years, I'd been wanting to read at least some of Lewis' trilogy because I'd heard it was a play on The Divine Comedy of Dante.  Alas, I don't think I know enough of Dante's great work to get the allusion.  Maybe it becomes more obvious in the later two books.  Lewis was such a wonderful writer, that even though I don't usually enjoy science fiction, I did enjoy this story.

For more book reviews, go to Read 52 Books in 52 Weeks.