[This is the first part of an essay I published in the Inklings Jahrbuch für Literatur und Ästhetik, Band 18, in 2000. I’ve revised it slightly. Part 2 can be found here.]
C. S. Lewis’s unfinished second novel, The Dark Tower (c. 1938-9), recasts the global crisis at the beginning of the Second World War as a battle of the books, a cosmic contest over the writing of twentieth-century history. Two different iconographies are at stake in Lewis’s text. The first is the iconography of what he called ‘scientific humanism’ (Letters 368) – as represented by the socialist future histories of J. B. S. Haldane, H. G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon – which embraces the radical changes brought about by the political, technological and cultural revolutions of the twentieth century. The second is the iconography of Renaissance Christian poetry, through which Lewis rejects these revolutions as manifestations of totalitarianism, and with which he seeks to supplant the scientific humanist iconographies. In The Dark Tower Lewis pitches these two literary modes against one another, ranging them about the grotesque figure of an automaton-dictator called the ‘Stingingman’, who has been spontaneously generated by the forces of modernity but whose physical characteristics make him equally at home in both iconographies. In charting the course of this battle Lewis offers us a vivid conservative vision of the struggle for control of the future in mid-century Europe.
Lewis mentions his battle with the ‘scientific humanists’ in a letter of 1939 describing the genesis of his first science fiction novel, Out of the Silent Planet (1938). ‘What set me about writing the book’, he explains,
Was the discovery that a pupil of mine took all that dream of interplanetary colonization quite seriously, and the realization that thousands of people, in one form or another depend on some hope of perpetuating and improving the human species for the whole meaning of the universe – that a ‘scientific’ hope of defeating death is a real rival to Christianity. At present, of course, the prospect of a war has rather dampened them. […] You will be both grieved and amused to learn that out of about sixty reviews, only two showed any knowledge that my idea of the fall of the Bent One was anything but a private invention of my own! But if only there were someone with a richer talent and more leisure, I believe this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelization of England: any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people’s minds under cover of romance without their knowing it. (Letters 321-2)
With minor variations Lewis reworks the themes of this letter in nearly every account he gives of his science fiction: the notion, for instance, that the socialist ‘hope of perpetuating and improving the human species’ by technological means represents a crude and highly dangerous pastiche of the Christian hope of an afterlife; that twentieth-century Christians are an embattled minority contending against ‘great ignorance’ – a tiny civilized community holding back the massed forces of barbarism; or that the weapons of the science-worshippers might profitably be used against them. Lewis’s exploitation of the radio for purposes of ‘evangelization’ was one practical result of this final conviction, reclaiming a small portion of the airwaves for Christian propaganda. Another was his effort, through his science fiction, to colonize the planets in the name of Christianity – or rather, to represent himself as a strenuous resister of the scientific project of ‘interplanetary colonization’. To understand the reasons for his resistance, and the path it took, we need to begin with a brief examination of the socialist colonialist enterprise as Lewis encountered it.
A succinct summary of the enterprise was provided in an essay by the biologist J. B. S. Haldane, ‘The Last Judgment’, from his book Possible Worlds (1927). The essay presents itself as an alternative vision of the end of the world to set alongside the visions offered by the major Western religions.[1] The problem with the Christian account of the Last Judgment, says Haldane, is the vast scale on which it is conceived. It seems to him improbable in the extreme that the actions of so diminutive a species as the human race should provoke an omnipotent creator into wiping out the ‘entire stellar system’, as happens in the Book of Revelation.[2] Instead Haldane proposes an end of the world – that is, of planet earth alone, not the solar system it is part of – on a much more modest scale; an Armageddon brought about by technology, whose disastrous effects on humanity may in turn be evaded, or at least deferred, by technological means. He postulates a time about forty billion years hence when human beings will have found the key to individual happiness – largely through the judicious manipulation of human biology known as eugenics – and when all the energy they need is supplied through the harnessing of the ‘tide-power’ of the world’s oceans. The effect of the ‘tide-machines’ is to disturb the orbit of the moon, and a crisis arises as that satellite drifts slowly closer to the earth and starts to show signs of breaking up. It becomes clear that the only chance of surviving the impending catastrophe is for the human race to abandon its home planet and launch itself into space.
At this point the work of the eugenicists changes as they begin to devote their research towards the task of refashioning the human body and mind to cope with the rigors of interplanetary travel. The instinctual drive to individual happiness is bred out of them, together with cognate emotions such as pride, a personal preference concerning the choice of sexual partners, and pity, ‘an unpleasant feeling aroused by the suffering of other individuals’ (Haldane 303). In their place the drive towards self-sacrifice for the collective good of the species – modeled on the selfless behaviour of the heroes and martyrs of history – is made the dominant characteristic of the race. Huge numbers of people sacrifice themselves in the effort to make the planet Venus habitable for humanity, an effort that also entails the eradication of all native life on the planet.
Once the exodus to Venus has been satisfactorily accomplished, the process of forging the species into a ‘super-organism or deity, possibly the only one in space-time’ is brought to fruition (Haldane 304). Telepathic communication enables all men and women to participate in a fully communal life. Plans are made for spreading the powers of the human super-organism throughout the galaxy, at the expense, where necessary, of other life forms. And after that, Haldane’s little parable concludes, ‘there are other galaxies’ (309). In this version of the future, humanity enjoys the prospect of occupying ‘eternity and infinity’ without assistance from non-human deities.
Haldane’s essay ends with a plea for new mythologies better suited to the needs of twentieth-century people than the old religions: capable of operating on the ‘new’ scales of time and space opened up by contemporary physics.[3] His appeal was brilliantly answered by the novelist-philosopher Olaf Stapledon in a dazzling sequence of speculative ‘future histories’ beginning with Last and First Men (1930), which traces the development of humankind across unimaginable distances of time and space, as the species leaps from planet to planet in a heroic bid to find a satisfactory way of living together and of achieving mental perfection. It was answered too by H. G. Wells, whose The Shape of Things to Come (1933) maps the evolution, across a much shorter time span, of a utopian World State, which starts out as a technocratic dictatorship and ends, like Haldane’s essay and Stapledon’s novel, in a quasi-religious vision. ‘The body of mankind,’ declares Wells’s historian of the future in a moment of Pauline rapture,
is now one single organism of nearly two thousand five hundred million persons. […] We are all members of one body. […] As […] the confluence of wills supersedes individual motives and loses its present factors of artificiality, the history of life will pass into a new phase, a phase with a common consciousness and a common will. […] And when that crest is attained what grandeur of life may not open out to Man! Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard; nor hath it entered into the mind of man to conceive… For now we see as in a glass darkly… (425-6)
The quotations from St Paul here declare the ambition of the scientific humanists to write what is in effect a modern Bible, a new spiritual history of which the Bible itself is only an infinitesimal building block, one of several textual ‘glasses’ (mirrors) which have given the people of the past a distorted glimpse of the infinite possibilities available to the species. Haldane, Stapledon and Wells aspire to colonize not only the planets but the philosophical and religious texts that have helped to shape Western culture.
If the scientific humanists express (through mimicry and selective quotation) a qualified admiration for the Christian tradition, Lewis professes a similarly qualified admiration for the grand narratives of ‘Wellsianity’.[4] His science fiction novels freely acknowledge their debt to Wells and Stapledon, and in a paper delivered to the Oxford Socratic Club in 1944 he speaks of having been ‘deeply moved’ by the heartbreaking beauty of the godless ‘world drama’ constructed by the socialist mythmakers.[5] But his project in his science fiction is the reverse of theirs: it is to rehabilitate ancient classical mythology and the Christian religion as still valid keys to the trajectories of past, present and future history. One might say that he colonizes the planets that had been seized as their territory by the socialists, but it would be more accurate in his terms to say that he reclaims them. In Out of the Silent Planet (1938) it is the visionary socialist scientist Weston who uses the vocabulary of imperialist aggression, while the Christian academic Ransom ‘goes native’, as Weston puts it (155); that is, he finds himself to be thoroughly at home in a universe which he finds he has been studying all his life. Lewis has him exclaim with pleasure as he examines a visual history of the universe sculpted by the Martians, ‘what an extraordinary coincidence […] that their mythology, like ours, associates some idea of the female with Venus’ (Silent Planet 129). Ransom discovers, in fact, that the iconography of the ancient world as reconfigured by Medieval and Renaissance Christian thinkers accurately represents the actual social, spatial and spiritual structure of the universe, and that Spenser and the Florentine Neoplatonists offer a more trustworthy account of human history than any ‘world drama’ concocted by modern scientists. As a result, each time Ransom returns to earth in between his adventures he lapses into a state of nostalgic yearning for the not-so-alien planets he has visited. They are his worlds, not the Wellsians’; he speaks their language, as Weston does not; and they represent the supreme affirmation of his lifelong work as a Cambridge philologist. In wandering the exotic landscapes of Mars and Venus he is wandering the pages of the old books he (or rather Lewis) loves, come alive and bursting with energy, and continuing to participate, now as when they were written, in the eternal cosmic struggle.
This is particularly clear when Ransom finds himself on Venus in the second of Lewis’s completed novels, Perelandra [aka Voyage to Venus] (1943). What he finds there is, on the one hand, a series of echoes of Stapledon – or rather, echoes of Stapledon’s echoes of Haldane, since Stapledon’s treatment of Venus in Last and First Men is clearly modeled on Haldane’s ‘The Last Judgment’. Here, as in Haldane, the first human act of interplanetary colonization is driven by the urge to preserve the species in the face of imminent extinction: the moon shows signs of colliding with the earth, and human biology is reengineered to make it capable of adapting to conditions on Venus (Stapledon 243ff.). An aggressive but intelligent native species – shaped something like a swordfish – is wiped out to make the transference possible; and many generations later, after another interplanetary leap and numerous physical and psychological changes, humanity achieves the capacity to think collectively as a quasi-divine ‘racial mind’ (Stapledon 299ff.). The Perelandra discovered by Lewis’s Ransom shares many characteristics with Stapledon’s Venus. The surface of both worlds is mostly ocean, and the ocean is pleasantly unsalted. Both atmospheres are subject to cataclysmic storms, and floating islands dot the storm-tossed waves, although in Stapledon’s Venus the islands are artificially constructed for the benefit of humanity, while in Lewis’s they are natural. Finally, both worlds are exposed to the threat of colonization. The physicist Weston arrives on Perelandra soon after Ransom and announces his allegiance to a Stapledonian philosophy: ‘To spread spirituality, not to spread the human race, is henceforth my mission’ (Perelandra 81-2).[6] The spirituality he advocates is the disembodied variety to which Haldane alludes at the end of ‘The Last Judgment’: ‘the emergence of a new kind of being which will bear the same relation to mind as do mind to life and life to matter’ (311-2). Haldane (and Stapledon after him) freely acknowledges the hostility that such visions of the future will arouse in even the most progressive twentieth-century thinkers (309-10); and Lewis’s hostility soon becomes vigorously apparent, as he brings the scientific humanist future histories into explosive contact with the Christian narrative.
In appearing on Perelandra at all, we learn, Weston has inadvertently thrown himself into a very old story of which the ‘new’ one he tells is no more than a feeble travesty. Venus is populated with the stuff of ancient myth: from obedient fish (benign counterparts of Stapledon’s aggressive swordfish), which carry men as a dolphin once carried the musician Arion, to mermaids, subterranean monarchies and dragons. Above all there is a new Adam and Eve, into whose tale all other mythologies have been incorporated, and in whose revised authorized version of Genesis Weston is to play the part of the satanic serpent. Soon after explaining his philosophy, Weston finds his body possessed by one of the characters (Satan) from the book he had planned to appropriate for his own ends, the Bible, and compelled to reenact the very myth that had been most decisively consigned to the realm of fantasy by the rise of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century – the theory which serves as the foundation of his commitment to the perpetual improvement of the human species, as it did of Stapledon’s. Weston’s ‘great ignorance’ of religious history (Lewis once accused Haldane of being as ignorant of history as Lewis was of science)[7] has left him vulnerable to a singularly nasty form of spiritual colonization. And the retribution for his ignorance is horribly enacted on the body he had hoped to discard: he is beaten to a pulp by Ransom in an extended fist-fight. It is difficult to imagine a more aggressive conclusion to what many readers might see as a merely academic, or bookish, quarrel.
But of course for Lewis the Bible is not just a book; it is the book, to which all others are no more than footnotes or polemical responses. Lewis’s science fiction is no fiction in the sense that a thriller or a chivalric romance is fiction; it participates in actual events on a more than cosmic scale that for him are taking place right here, right now, as he writes and as we read. We ourselves are part of the story they tell, which is a chapter in the ‘universal story’ described in Miracles (1947) of which ‘we are not, perhaps, very attentive readers’ (103). This conviction provides the driving force behind the extraordinarily vibrant descriptions of planetary and interplanetary life that unfold in paragraph after paragraph of the four science fiction novels: the invitations to feel the cosmic rays that permeate space or ‘heaven’ on Ransom’s journey to Mars, to taste the fruits he plucks on Perelandra, to wince as his open wounds adhere to the skin of the Perelandran fish he is riding, or to be overwhelmed by the most ancient of languages as it emerges ‘like castles’ from the mouth of Dimble in That Hideous Strength (228). All these are attempts to make us feel with our bodies a life that lies beyond the text – not just in the ‘other world’ of dreams or the imagination, but in the everyday world we inhabit and in the spiritual world that touches it at every point. The conviction that his writing is a contribution to living history is what renders Lewis’s writing iconographic.
In his last work of criticism, Spenser’s Images of Life (1967), Lewis defines iconography as the practice of making visual or verbal images which both describe and participate in the world outside the work of art: ‘art jutting out into life, and life turning into art’ (11). The Renaissance achieved this effect by incorporating a language of symbols embodying moral and psychological qualities into their public art: the decorations of public buildings, for instance; or the pageantry of tournaments, where real knights fought with one another in the context of an imaginary story; or masques, whose imaginative embodiments of aristocratic virtues were performed by real aristocrats. ‘Iconographical art,’ Lewis tells us,
was not a comment on life, so much as a continual statement of it – an accompaniment, rather than a criticism. Or, if you wish, life itself, in another mode. The planets (it said), the Virtues, the Vices, the Liberal Arts, the Worthies, are thus. If now we were to use a similar art, it would be full of figures symbolizing the atom, evolution, relativity, totalitarianism, democracy, and so on. (Images 11)
In his science fiction Lewis begins to flesh out a twentieth-century iconography of the sort he refers to in this final sentence. He achieves the iconographic effect of ‘art jutting out into life, and life turning into art’ (Images 11) by insisting that his readers are actively involved in the events he describes, as Weston is, whether they like it or not. In Out of the Silent Planet the angelic being Oyarsa tells Ransom, and in doing so tells the reader, that the events in the novel are part of the pageant of human history: ‘The year we are now in – but heavenly years are not as yours – has long been prophesied as a year of stirrings and high changes’ (166). Later the narrator Lewis tells us that these cosmic changes have overtaken his readers even before they began to read: ‘What neither of us foresaw was the rapid march of events which was to render the book out of date before it was published’ (180). An even more daring shift in narrative perspective occurs in The Dark Tower, when the narrator (again Lewis) suddenly reveals that the story will not have ended after the last page has been written. The Tower of the story’s title is still standing; ‘the things I am describing are not over and done with’ (32). Scudamour’s diagnosis of the relationship between his companions – a group of scholars gathered in Cambridge to witness an experiment – and the alternative world they are privileged to view by means of the experiment, is equally applicable to Lewis’s readers. There are, Sudamour says, ‘bits of our world in there, or bits of it out here among us’ (48). Lewis’s science fiction aspires to ‘jut out into life’ as obtrusively as an Elizabethan stage jutted into its audience.
In fact, the quasi-scientific premise at the centre of The Dark Tower derives from a twentieth-century text which suggests that the dividing line between ‘fiction’ and ‘real life’ is a good deal less clear-cut than much of our thinking tends to suggest. The scholars at Cambridge find themselves confronted with a ‘chronoscope’ (19), a device for seeing into other times – past, future, or concurrent with their own; and the inspiration for the chronoscope came, they are told, from a celebrated book by the aeronautical inventor J. W. Dunne, An Experiment with Time (1927). Dunne’s book sets out to offer empirical evidence that future events may be ‘previsioned’ by the sleeping mind – that dreams are made up in approximately equal parts of memories of time past and foreshadowings of time to come – and furnishes a theory to account for such prevision. Both Stapledon and Wells made use of Dunne’s book in their future histories as a means of marking the difference between these narratives and the conventional novel. Last and First Men and The Shape of Things to Come present themselves as visions from another epoch, obtained through one of the feats of inverted remembering of which An Experiment with Time offers so many strange examples. Stapledon’s narrative purports to have been directly transmitted to the author’s brain by a future human inhabitant of the planet Neptune, as part of an immense scheme to educate the primitive earlier generations of humankind in the philosophical principles held dear by the Neptunians; while Wells’s text poses as the inadequate transcription of a book read in a dream by a man with the ominous name of Raven, who died before his transcriptions reached print.[8] In The Dark Tower, then, Lewis took over what he may have seen as the most ‘iconographic’ element of his rivals’ fictions: a chronic theory which proposed direct contact between the imaginative faculties and ‘real’ future events, between art and life, and which aimed to demonstrate the plausibility of the claims of the prophets, mystics, poets and dreamers who were the object of Lewis’s more than scholarly interest. Lewis’s, Wells’s and Stapledon’s fictions depend on a text – Dunne’s book – which roots their extravagant speculations in the mysterious common ground of the living human brain.
Reading, for Lewis, was as vivid a process as remembering. ‘I know,’ he wrote in 1940,
the geography of Tormance [in David Lindsay’s A Voyage to Arcturus] better than that of Tellus [i.e. earth]. […] Though I saw the trenches before Arras I could not now lecture on them so tactically as on the Greek wall, and Scamander and the Scaean Gate. As a social historian I am sounder on Toad Hall and the Wild Wood or the cave-dwelling Selenites [in Wells’s the First Men in the Moon] or Hrothgar’s court [in Beowulf] […] than on London, Oxford, and Belfast. (Of This and Other Worlds 29)
The Dark Tower can be read, of course, as a speculative fiction concerning the nature of time, but we might also think of it as a meditation on the act of reading in the twentieth century. The location where the action begins – a scholar’s study in the University of Cambridge – is a space dedicated to reading, and although the chronoscope resembles a cinema projector rather than a book (it works by throwing moving images onto a screen, and the dominant image recalls the futuristic buildings of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1926) or William Cameron Menzies’s Things to Come (1936)), many of the pictures it shows have literary associations.[9] The Tower itself, as it appears on the screen, is a gloomy simulacrum of the recently completed tower of Cambridge University Library – a building Lewis abominated; and although the Othertime Tower is not a library, it contains a room full of books to which the story’s protagonist, the young scientist Scudamour, inevitably makes his way. Here he settles down, at the end of the surviving fragment, to read a history of the time into which he has plunged, and he is immersed in the business of reading when we leave him.
Scudamour enters the Othertime projected by the chronoscope through what might be called a spontaneous act of the readerly will – an accomplishment that a combative scholar like Lewis would no doubt have given his right arm to reproduce. Enraged by something he sees on the screen, Scudamour hurls himself at it, as if to engage in an ungainly academic wrestling-match with his demonic double in Othertime – the Stingingman – of the kind Lewis later took to its bloody conclusion in Perelandra. In the process he somehow swaps souls with the Stingingman, and finds himself in the alternative world he had reacted against so violently, trapped in another man’s body, his tongue constrained by another man’s language. It is tempting to see this as Lewis’s take on the readerly encounter with a disturbing but horrifically vigorous text – an encounter of the sort he describes with such passion in his essay ‘On Stories’.[10] For Lewis, certain ancient and modern adventure stories took on the quality of a lived experience – just as the inventor of the chronoscope in The Dark Tower suggests that certain memories of the past and future constitute direct encounters with other times. ‘On Stories’ indicates that in 1940 some at least of the stories uppermost in Lewis’s mind were scientific romances: Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus (1920), Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901) and The War of the Worlds (1897). These, indeed, are just three of the texts into which Scudamour rashly launches himself; his experiences in Othertime, for instance, closely resemble the adventures of Wells’s Time Traveller among the Eloi and the Morlocks. But the texts that really stir his soul to rage are the future histories of Stapledon and Wells.
The Dark Tower itself seems to have been plucked wholesale from an episode in Last and First Men – the same episode Lewis later used as the basis for his last work of science fiction, That Hideous Strength (1945). As the unfinished narrative unfolds we learn that the Tower houses a Big Brain, although we never get to meet it. The servants of the Brain – the Stingingman and his minions – are men and women reduced to the condition of automata. Readers of Stapledon’s text should recognize at once the society of the Fourth Men, a particularly grim stage in the evolution of the interplanetary human race. The Fourth Men are a community of giant brains, each housed in an artificial cranium in the form of a tower, a ‘roomy turret of ferro-concrete some forty feet in diameter’ (211). These ‘preposterous factories of the mind’ are serviced by the docile relics of the previous stage in human evolution, the Third Men, whose telepathic link to their masters suppresses their individuality and makes them ‘an army of […] perfect slaves’ (218). By entering the Dark Tower, then, Scudamour enters one of the gloomiest literary forecasts of the scientific humanists – much as Weston was later to enter the living world of Christian myth. And the longer he stays there the more deeply he becomes enmeshed in the scientific humanist vision. When he visits the room full of books and begins to read the history of Othertime he is duplicating the feat of the man called Raven in The Shape of Things to Come: studying an unfamiliar civilization in a text from another time. And the history he reads is once again an adaptation of a story told in Last and First Men. It concerns a culture as obsessed with the workings of time as our own is obsessed with the workings of space: and that culture is instantly recognizable as that of Stapledon’s Fifth Men, who ‘as a race […] were peculiarly fascinated by time’ (231), and whose researches are devoted to the exploration of cultures of the past by means of the mental time-travel pioneered by Dunne. Like Dunne, the scientists of Lewis’s Othertime convince themselves that dreams contain images of other times besides the past, and like Stapledon’s Fifth Men they are prepared to experiment on children to test their theory. Stapledon’s narrator shows the same horrific detachment from the effects of these experiments as does the Othertime historian; he states simply that ‘[t]he experience seemed to set up a progressive mental disintegration which produced first insanity, then paralysis, and, within a few months, death’ (239). The Dark Tower closely paraphrases this sentence: ‘The experiences of these children had very disagreeable effects, leading to extreme terror and finally to insanity, and most of those whom he used had to be destroyed before they reached maturity’ (Tower 89). And the ends to which the Othertime experiments tend – the achievement of a kind of immortality by leaping from time to time rather as Stapledon’s people leap from planet to planet – recall the vision of immortality vouchsafed to the Eighteenth and final variety of the human species in Last and First Men, for whom cosmic events recur in a never-ending cycle throughout eternity (305-6).
The scientist Scudamour finds himself as disgusted as Lewis by this kind of immortality: ‘I’d sooner go to a heaven of harps and angels like what they used to tell me about when I was a boy. […] I’d sooner have anything than go round and round that way like a rat in a bucket of water’ (Tower 88). His repugnance resembles the repugnance occasionally felt by the scientific humanists themselves at the future they had imagined. Haldane, for instance, expresses his personal distaste for the Venusian mentality he conjures up in ‘The Last Judgment’, where humans have become ‘mere components of a monstrous ant-heap’ (309-10). In Stapledon’s Last and First Men the merciless annihilation of the natives of Venus by a supposedly enlightened human race plunges all humankind into a state of collective depression that lasts for millennia (252-3). Wells’s Raven is unable to copy out the later stages of his dream-history of time to come, appalled – perhaps mentally unhinged – by the atrocities that will have been perpetrated in the struggle to bring about the utopian World State (Wells 331-4). For Lewis, of course, the distaste of the scientific humanists for their own workmanship is a natural reaction to its violation of the universal moral order; and in That Hideous Strength he explores the possibility that this repulsion might form the basis for the conversion of modern scientists from their atheism. The social scientist Mark Studdock begins his conversion during a visit to a repulsive room very like the one where Scudamour first encounters the Stingingman; and presumably Scudamour’s visit to the Dark Tower will end in a similar conversion. We must return to the Stingingman and his room, though, to understand the nature of the conversion Scudamour is to undergo.
[Continued here.]
Bibliography
Crossley, Robert. ‘Olaf Stapledon and the Idea of Science Fiction.’ Modern Fiction Studies 32 (1986): 21-42.
Dunne, J. W. An Experiment with Time. London: Faber and Faber, 1958.
Fiedler, Lesley A. Olaf Stapledon: A Man Divided. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983.
Haldane, J. B. S. Possible Worlds and Other Essays. London: Chatto and Windus, 1927.
Kegler, Karl. ‘Travels, Towers, Space and Time: Lewis’s The Dark Tower and its Correspondences.’ Inklings-Jahnrbuch 16 (1998): 119-137.
Lewis, C. S. The Dark Tower and Other Stories. Ed. Walter Hooper. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1983.
Lewis, C. S. Letters. Ed. W. H. Lewis, rev. Walter Hooper. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1988.
Lewis, C. S. Miracles. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1988.
Lewis, C. S. Of This and Other Worlds. Ed. Walter Hooper. Glasgow: Fount Paperbacks, 1984.
Lewis, C. S. Out of the Silent Planet. London: Pan Books, 1952.
Lewis, C. S. Perelandra [Voyage to Venus]. London: Pan Books, 1983.
Lewis, C. S. Spenser’s Images of Life. Ed. Alistair Fowler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Lewis, C. S. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups. London: Pan Books, 1983.
Lewis, C. S. They Asked for a Paper: Papers and Addresses. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1962.
Lindsay, David. A Voyage to Arcturus. London: Sphere Books, 1980.
Stapledon, Olaf. Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1963.
Wells, H. G. The Shape of Things to Come. London: Corgi Books, 1967.
Notes
[1] For Lewis’s response to Haldane’s essay see ‘A Reply to Professor Haldane’ (Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds 97-109).
[2] Revelation 20.11.
[3] See also Haldane’s essay ‘On Scales’ (1-6).
[4] The term ‘Wellsianity’ seems to have been invented by someone who attended a talk by Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, given to the Oxford Socratic Club in 1944 (They Asked for a Paper 154n).
[5] See They Asked for a Paper, 154-6, which offers Lewis’s version of the Wellsian ‘world drama’. I am grateful to my friend and colleague Donald Mackenzie for drawing this text to my attention.
[6] On the relation of this passage to Stapledon’s philosophy see Fiedler, 130-3).
[7] ‘My science is usually wrong. Why, yes. So is the Professor’s history’ (Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds 98).
[8] For Stapledon’s use of Dunne, see Fiedler, 58ff. Wells refers to Dunne in Things to Come, 16-17. For Dunne’s reply to Wells’s criticisms of his book see Dunne, 211-4.
[9] For Lewis’s possible debt to Metropolis see Kegler, 119-37.
[10] See Lewis, Of This and Other Worlds, 25-45. See also his essay ‘On Science Fiction’, ibid, 80-96, esp. 93.