Cosmic Journeys III

In CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy:

Out Of The Silent Planet describes Elwin Ransom's journey to Mars and ends when Ransom, back on Earth, writes to Lewis;

Perelandra begins when Lewis visits Ransom, then describes Ransom's journey to Venus;

That Hideous Strength, set entirely on Earth, features many characters including Ransom, MacPhee and Lewis and ends when Ransom returns to Venus.

Thus, the Trilogy is structured as follows:

interplanetary journey, correspondence with Lewis;
conversation with Lewis, interplanetary journey;
conversations and conflicts with several characters, interplanetary journey.

Three other works feature Lewis as character and narrator:

"The Dark Tower" begins when Ransom, Lewis, MacPhee, Orfieu and Scudamour converse, then describes Scudamour's visit to an alternative Earth;

"The Shoddy Lands" begins when a former student and his fiancee visit Lewis, then describes Lewis' visit to the fiancee's mind;

The Great Divorce begins with Lewis already visiting a mysterious realm where he later converses with George MacDonald.

The structure of this loose Lewis trilogy is:

conversation involving Lewis, visit to a parallel realm;
conversation involving Lewis, visit to a mental realm;
visit to spiritual realms, conversation involving Lewis.

One other work fits into this sequence. "Forms of Things Unknown" begins when Jenkin and Ward converse after a lecture, then describes Jenkin's journey to the Moon. The four characters who make cosmic journeys are:

:

Ransom, to Mars and Venus;
Scudamour, to Othertime;
Lewis, to the Shoddy Lands and to a dream of the hereafter;
Jenkin to the Moon.

Lewis converses, fictitiously of course, with his fictitious character, Ransom, then converses, also fictitiously, with an earlier writer, MacDonald. The line of literary descent is that MacDonald inspired Lewis who created Ransom but Lewis, by entering his own fictions, converses with both the others.

    

"The Dark Tower" was written before Perelandra and as a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet so I propose that the "Lewis trilogy" should be read between Volumes I and II of the Ransom Trilogy. That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, describes some technological advances after the War and "Forms of Things Unknown" describes the further technological advance of flight to the Moon so I propose that "Forms..." be read after the trilogies. (Weston's earlier space journeys were not made public and Weston died on Venus so that flights to the Moon - there were three before Jenkin's - came as a new development.)

"The Dark Tower" and Perelandra are direct sequels to Out Of The Silent Planet but "The Dark Tower" and its two "sequels" (I argue that they can be seen as such) change the direction, replacing Ransom with Lewis until the former returns in Perelandra. Although Ransom appears in four of the seven works and MacPhee in three, Lewis is in six. He becomes the central or continuing character of the sequence before returning that role to Ransom. Most people know of Narnia and many have read Ransom but it may not be widely recognised that Lewis himself plays such a major role in his own fiction. 

CS Lewis: Planetary Environments

Each volume of CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy presents a fanciful account of another planet. Lewis' Malacandra, Perelandra and Sulva, nominally identical with Mars, Venus and the Moon, are imaginary worlds unlike their counterparts in the astronomical Solar System. All three are inhabited and humanly habitable. Malacandra has "canals."

Perelandra has oceans. Sulva has a troglodyte race to that extent reminiscent of the Wellsian Selenites. Malacandra and Perelandra are visited from Earth whereas Sulva is merely described by characters who remain on Earth. The lunar race that is great according to one account is cursed in the other. When Lewis tells us of a wondrous realm on the far side of the Moon invisible from Earth, he, of course, presents mythological, not scientifically based, fiction.

By contrast, in "Forms of Things Unknown," Lewis tries to imagine what the lunar surface might really be like. His character lands in a crater and ventures out in a spacesuit. The surface is "...rock, not dust (which disposed of one hypothesis)..." (1) There is of course no sound. The lack of atmosphere means that the light, whether directly from the sun or reflected from the rock, is dazzling. Shadows are "...like Indian ink..." (2) The lack of atmosphere prevents any sense of distance. The remote crater wall looks as if it could be touched. The peaks look small and the stars near - although Lewis does not also mention the relative closeness of the horizon due to the smaller size of the Moon.

Despite all this, I argue that "Forms of Things Unknown" can be read as consistent with the Ransom Trilogy. Jenkin transmits to Earth so he has landed on the near side of the Moon. He remains on the surface so does not see any troglodytes. It is stated in the third Ransom novel that the eradication of organic life from the surface has been a deliberate policy of the Great Race. In the concluding paragraph, Jenkin is surprised by the sudden appearance of a character from Greek mythology on the lunar surface but the story had begun with a quotation from Perelandra:

"...that what was myth in one world might always be fact in another." (3)

The mythological being kills Jenkin as it had killed the members of three previous expeditions, leaving High Command on Earth with no clue as to their fate. This is consistent with the idea in the Ransom Trilogy that Earth, the "Silent Planet," is besieged and that consequently travel beyond the lunar orbit has been banned. Weston was allowed to reach Mars and Venus but only because this served a greater purpose and Ransom tells Lewis that "...'Weston' has shut the door..." (4)

"Forms of Things Unknown," considered as a single fictional work, exists only to shock the reader with its surprise ending whereas relocating it into a broader narrative context necessitates an explanation for the manifestation of a myth on the Moon. However, the Ransom Trilogy, with Ares and Aphrodite respectively presiding over Malacandra and Perelandra, has more than enough mythological content for this purpose. Here, "Mars" means both the planet and the deity albeit within Lewis' imaginative classical-Christian context. Science and myth collide when lunar airlessness contradicts Jenkin's impression that an approaching figure has long, thick hairs blowing in the wind... 

Like HG Wells and ER Burroughs, CS Lewis presents, in several sometimes indirectly linked works, a Solar System where inhabited planets interact.

  (1) CS Lewis, "Forms of Things Unknown" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories, London, 1983, pp. 124-132, AT p. 129.
(2) ibid., p. 130.
(3) ibid., p. 124.
(4) CS Lewis, Out of the Silent Planet, London, 1952, p. 187.