A British SF Classic II

Compare CS Lewis' angelic "Heaven"-dwelling eldila with the space-dwelling beings in works by Fred Hoyle, James Blish and Poul Anderson. These three hard sf writers present scientific rationales for their imagined extra-planetary intelligences.

Hoyle's Black Cloud, addressing human scientists, says:

"'...conventional religion, as many humans accept it, is illogical in its attempt to conceive of entities lying outside the Universe. Since the Universe comprises everything, it is evident that nothing can lie outside it. The idea of a "god" creating the Universe is a mechanistic absurdity clearly derived from the making of machines by men. I take it we are in agreement about all this.'"
-Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (Harmondsworth, Middlesex, 1965), p. 203.

I am in agreement now although not when I first read the book fifty years ago because I had been religiously indoctrinated. Hoyle through his characters, both human and non-human, addresses several important issues:

the role of scientists in society;
the relationship of science to reality;
how intelligence evolved on Earth;
whether there is a larger-scale intelligence;
why the laws of physics are as they are;
whether a larger-scale intelligence might explain the laws of physics.

(Hoyle's latter non-fiction included The Intelligent Universe and he argued against Darwinism.)

The novel is set in the 1960s, thus has become what I call a "past future," but it retains an element of futurity because its closing fictitious correspondence is dated 2021 and ends:

"Do we want to remain big people in a tiny world or to become a little people in a vaster world? This is the ultimate climax towards which I have directed my narrative." (p. 219)

So how do we in 2014 answer that question?

A British SF Classic

See previous post.

CS Lewis' reply to HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come, That Hideous Strength, was published in 1945, four years before Orwell's 1984 and twelve years before Fred Hoyle's first novel, The Black Cloud.

The Black Cloud contains an apt Biblical quotation but otherwise is an excellent British sf novel in the Wellsian tradition but based on updated data. Hoyle presents not Martians invading Earth but an intelligent gas cloud entering the Solar System. The chapter in which a scientist proves by answering and asking questions that the invasive cloud is alive is a perfect Platonic dialogue.

In Greek literature, "Homer and the poets" were followed by Plato and the philosophers. One of Hoyle's characters realizes that, by answering a question, he has conceded a point, as though he were arguing with Plato's mentor and dramatic persona, Socrates - and, in fact, Socrates appears as a historical character in Hoyle's later sf novel, October The First Is Too Late.

More on this later.

The Bible And Science In Literature

(i) The Bible and Homer are foundation documents of Western civilization.

(ii) Some major works have Biblical and Classical contents, e.g., Dante's Comedy; John Milton's Paradise Lost and Samson Agonistes.

(iii) The cited Miltonic works also have Classical forms: epic and dramatic, respectively.

(iv) Many other works refer to the Bible but have historical or contemporary contents.

(v) Mary Shelley initiated speculative fiction about consequences of science, thus about possible futures.

(vi) Because her scientist character, Frankenstein, described in the title as "The Modern Prometheus," creates human life, a new Adam, her novel opens with a quotation from Paradise Lost.

(vii) Wells, Stapledon and others developed the new tradition of speculative fiction/science fiction/sf.

(viii) CS Lewis' interplanetary novels defend a Biblical/medieval world view against the Wellsian/Stapledonian idea that mankind can remake itself with science.

(ix) Paradise Lost influenced Lewis' Perelandra, James Blish's post-Lewis The Day After Judgement and Philip Pullman's anti-Lewis His Dark Materials.

(x) So far, we have:

an ancient Biblical tradition;
a modern science fictional tradition;
continued Biblical themes and references in fiction;
a science fictional defense of Biblical belief by CS Lewis.