“It would be a strange but not an inconceivable world; heroism and poetry at the bottom, cold scientific intellect above it, and overtopping all some dark superstition which scientific intellect, helpless against the revenge of the emotional depths it had ignored, had neither will nor power to remove.”
Gorgeous themes at work in this book reconciling scientific endeavor with humanist intentions and a few other themes as relevant today as they must have been then at the start of the modern century.
I’m enjoying his poetic, philosophical really, reflections on the experiences of space well before humanity had physically reached it.
“He had read of “Space”: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now – now that the very name “Space” seemed a blasphemous libel for the empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it “dead”; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren: he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly upon the earth with so many eyes – and here, with how many more! No: space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens…”
I was really surprised this trilogy existed when I first learnt of it…hadn’t heard much of it or this side of Lewis’s writing at all.
I’m also fascinated by the idea of The Inklings and the notion (rumor?) that the main character of this story on a journey through space between worlds is based on Lewis’s friend, J.R.R. Tolkien.
Has anyone read his Space Trilogy?
Does anyone know much about the influence this might have had on other works?h
by itswac