C.S. Lewis, H.G. Wells and Arthur C. Clarke
SPOILERS BELOW. I discuss the meaning of several books by C.S. Lewis, Arthur C. Clarke and H.G. Wells, and the books cannot be discussed without a discussion of their surprise endings. You Have Been Warned.
I am reading (but have not finished) a book by Doris T. Myers called C.S. LEWIS IN CONTEXT, where the authoress advances the argument that C.S. Lewis, in his fiction writing, addressed a central preoccupation of the European intelligentsia after the culture-wide disillusionment and loss of spiritual strength ushered in by the decimation of the Great War (World War I). That preoccupation was with language and its relation to reality. The pre-War consensus was that words had meaning, and were shaped by the ideals and ideas which these words embodied: a word was an incarnation of a real idea. The post-War consensus was that words were a side-effect of mechanical actions in the nervous system, having no meaning in and of themselves: the modernists idea is that there are no ideas, only Madison Avenue manipulations of linguistic machinery to attempt to influence your thinking machinery.
While I side with Aristotle in most things, when it comes to language, I am a Platonist. If the truths discovered by mathematics are not objective in every sense of the word—things whose reality depends not on the observer but on itself for its truth—then with word “truth” has no reality. And, if the word “truth” has no reality, than neither can the statement “the word ‘truth’ has no reality”‘have any reality.
The conclusions and opinions of C.S. Lewis in these matters can be discerned in his nonfiction essay, THE ABOLITION OF MAN, and also in his fictionalization of that essay, THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH; and an acute reader will notice the way language is used in PRELENDRA and OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET, in the scenes of the temptation of the Green Lady of Venus, or the deposition of Weston by the Eldil, with accompanying translation from English into the True Speech.
Doris T. Myers also advances the proposition that Lewis represents a serious contribution to the science fiction field, augmenting mere adventure stories into tales with a serious moral point and philosophical reflection.
Meyers gives short shrift to the notion that C.S. Lewis cannot be considered a ‘real’ science fiction writer because his science was not up to the Jules Verne standard of nuts-and-bolts accuracy. Lewis’s Space Trilogy contains scientific errors not any more or less glaring than those typical for science fiction writers. I notice that H.G. Wells, for example, places an atmosphere on the moon. This is not less scientific than Lewis putting canals on Mars, which, I notice, Robert Heinlein does as well. The Cavorite of Wells is not one iota less pure Handwavium than the mysterious property of solar rays used by Weston to propel his space-vessel, or the unexplained crystal that powers the Time Traveler’s time machine. Even the best science fiction writers simply invent whatever balonium is needed to move the plot. (If you need me to flood the warp core with tachyon particles in order to reverse the polarity, I will be down at the Church of All Worlds, groking my geriatric spice, talking with Diktor & Mycroft, cranched under my cranching wire, and reading up on Psychohistory and Robopsychology.)
C.S. Lewis himself was a champion of the idea that science fiction should be taken seriously: C.S. Lewis regarded it as regrettable that a book of ideas like Arthur C. Clarke’s CHILDHOOD’S END would be dismissed as juvenilia while modernistic books be feted. In a letter, Lewis says:
Of course, the admiration of the author of the Ransom Trilogy for the author of CHILDHOOD’S END will come as no surprise to those who recognize where these books stand in the Great Dialog of the Pen. Arthur C. Clarke’s novel was an answer and a rebuttal to OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET and to THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH in the same way that C. S. Lewis’ novel was a rebuttal and an answer to FIRST MEN IN THE MOON by H.G. Wells.
Let me see if I can lend weight to the speculation that one book was meant to answer another. First I will discuss Wells and Lewis, and next Lewis and Clarke.
That Lewis is openly Christian in his world-view is something no one denies: but I would also like to add weight to the argument that CHILDHOOD’S END by Arthur C. Clarke is not merely an anti-Christian book, but actually a heretical one. It espouses Gnosticism not quite as openly as VOYAGE TO ARCTURUS by David Lindsay, but the trace is unmistakable. (I speak of the book and not the author. I cannot imagine someone as openly atheistic as Clarke actually buying into Gnosticism literally, with its absurd hierarchy of angels and emanations: I speak only of a similarity of imaginations.)
Wells and Lewis:
The parallels between OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET and H.G. Wells’ FIRST MEN IN THE MOON are pretty clear.
In FIRST MEN IN THE MOON, a scientist and a businessman, Cavor and Bedford, fly to the moon in an antigravity sphere, and experience a strange euphoria while in space. They land, are captured, and Cavor is taken to be deposed by the Grand Lunar, the ruling intellect of the Moon, who hears his testimony of Man’s warlike ways with disbelief and horror. Cavor communicated by wireless to Earth, but the Lunars prevent him from revealing the secret of spaceflight before silencing his wireless set forever. Bedford returns to Earth, but a child playing in the sphere accidently shoots it out into space, never to be recovered, so no future contact or commerce between Earth and Space is possible. Earth is quarantined.
The Lunar beings are the ideal example of organization under a scientifically totalitarian state, with each insect-man born and bred to its task, which it performs with soulless efficiency, unable to desire or imagine rebellion or malingering, or is placed in opiate suspended animation until needed, having no individualism or friction with its neighbors. Both Cavor and Bedford express dismay at the idea that the White Man would descend upon the Moon as upon Asia and the Americas, and place the natives under colonial rule.
In OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET, the two adventurers, the scientist called Weston and the businessman called Devine, are joined by a philologist, whom they kidnap. The sphere has artificially gravity rather than no gravity, and the space euphoria has a religious overtone: it is described as Deep Heaven, a place where the sun’s rays have healthy and benevolent effects normally cut by Earth’s atmosphere. They land, are not captured, and are taken to be deposed by the Ruling Intelligence of Mars, a disembodied being, no doubt an angel, named Malacandra, who hears his testimony of Man’s warlike ways with disbelief and horror, but hears the tale of the Incarnation of Christ with reverent wonder. The earthmen are commanded to return to Earth, and, once they land, a Martian weapon, or, rather, divine wrath, smites the space-travelling sphere and destroys it so no future contact or commerce between Earth and Space is possible. Earth is quarantined.
The Martian beings are unfallen creatures, who live without the competition or jealousy we take for granted, and are an ideal example of Christian social teaching, brotherhood, and even hierarchy. C.S. Lewis uses the deposition scene as an opportunity to mock and show the weaknesses of the imperialistic race-drives which claim man should conquer heaven and earth alike, subjugating any alien beings we find. Not just colonialism, but the entire mind-set of the scientifically organized state, homo sapiens uber alles, is condemned.
There are other minor parallelisms: neither the Sorns of Malacandra nor the Selenites of the Moon have books, albeit both have advanced civilizations.
Likewise PERELENDRA has parallels to THE TIME MACHINE. C.S. Lewis, for one thing, copies H.G. Wells’ plot outline: the story is told as a flashback between the framing sequence of the visitor to the home of the Traveler (in Lewis, a space traveler, in Wells, a time traveler). In both, the Visitor hears the Traveler expound his theories. He returns later, and the Traveler emerges from his journey, and tells the Visitor his adventures over a meal. (As befits their themes, breakfast for Ransom, dinner for the Time Traveler.)
There are minor parallels: the Time Traveler has flower petals brought back from the far future, and Ransom the Space Traveler has flower petals brought back from Venus. Both go to a garden world, meeting folk who apparently have no goals beyond leisure and play. Both are caught in the rain when they first arrive, thought the Time Traveler lands in a chilling hail, whereas Ransom lands in a warm shower. Both try to protect their friends, Tinidril or Weena, and end up in an underground combat, either with Morlocks or with the Un-Man.
There are deliberate contrasts: the Time Traveler, having eaten nothing but fruit, is starved for steak, and also haggard, thin and sickly from his travails. Ransom has eaten the food of Venus, an Eden, and cannot tolerate the smell or thought of meat, and he looks so healthy, brimming with energy and verve, that he cannot believe the earthmen are not ill.
The theme of THE TIME MACHINE the destiny of man as brought about by blind evolution; the theme of PERELENDRA is the Fall of Man, the destiny as brought about by moral failure (on Earth) and success (on Venus). Both are eschatological novels. The Time Traveler sees the ultimate fate of man after he departs from the time of the Morlocks: a crablike animal on a tideless shore beneath a swollen red sun. Ransom, transported in a vision called The Great Dance, sees the ultimate destiny of man: the Fall will be corrected, and the end of the old earth will be merely the beginning, the first step, of ever greater glories: the Apocalypse of St. John is not the end of history, merely the end of mankind’s confinement to a cosmic sick bed, from which we will arise hale and singing.
A more complex set of parallels can be seen in the way the Time Traveler goes through various theories about the world he is seeing: at first he thinks the perfection of industrial society has rendered the Eloi weak and childlike by eliminating all threats from their environment, ergo eliminating all Darwinian pressure to maintain intelligence; then he thinks the survival of the fittest exaggerated the class distinctions, with Eloi descended from aristocrats and Morlocks from workingmen; then he realizes the Eloi are cattle for the tool-using Morlocks, which is, as a metaphor at least, something of a condemnation of how men use technology to control the environment, namely, that they cannot resist the temptation to use technology to control each other, as cattle.
Likewise, in three audiences with Tinidril the Green Lady, the issue of survival of the fittest is addressed when the ‘feeble’ peoples of Malacandra are discovered not to be merely a dying race due to their age. They do not fit into the neat Victorian scheme of evolution at all. She denounces the popular idea that whatever is newer is better.
In a next scene, the same class distinction found so distasteful to the Time Traveler appears when the Green Lady, who is the sovereign Queen of Venus, discovers that Ransom is not the Adam of Earth, was not sent by Eve, and ergo he is not equal to her in rank. Christians, who hold animals to be lesser beings and angels to be higher, admit of an innate hierarchy or order of beings in the cosmos.
In the final scene in PERELENDRA, the menace of technology is presented as controlled, so long as moral order obtains: when Tor, the King of Venus, whose face bears the imprint of Christ Himself, prophesizes, or, rather, since is he sovereign, commands the fate of his world in times to come, one thing he mentions is commanding angelic powers to tear aside the clouds of Venus that his children might gaze in wonder at the stars. This is parallel to a passage in Milton which says that if Adam had not fallen, he and his children would have risen by degrees to great those happy beings who dwell among the fortunate islands of the stars. It is a vision of a command over nature which technology promises, but, for fallen men, the promise cannot be trusted, for we ourselves are the ancestors of the Morlocks.
Obviously Lewis’ main inspiration for his tale comes from Milton. It is interesting to note Miltonian details present in PRELENDRA but not in the Book of Genesis, such as the scene where Satan whispers at the ear of the sleeping Eve, or the Un-Man at the ear of the sleeping Green Lady. Lewis was composing his A PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST that same year. But the influence an inspiration from H.G. Wells is also present, unless all these parallels are merely coincidence.
I would also argue that it is well known that C.S. Lewis read H.G. Wells (whom he mentions by name in OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET). The science fiction field in those days consisted of H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon and Jules Verne, a very few hardback books, and a small grove of pulp magazines, of which only one or two published serious, thought-provoking work. Everyone in the field knew everyone else.
Lewis and Clarke:
It is not generally known that the great Arthur C. Clarke, one of the three titans of the golden age of science fiction, wrote a letter to C.S. Lewis criticizing his portrayal of space travel in his Ransom Trilogy, and trying to persuade the Inkling that space travel was sure to be beneficial and benevolent. This lead to a long standing correspondence between the two science fiction writers.
I submit that CHILDHOOD’S END is Clarke’s answer to Lewis even as the Space Trilogy is Lewis’s rebuttal to H.G. Wells.
It is no coincidence that, in OUT FROM THE SILENT PLANET, the angels destroy the space-travelling sphere of Weston, and pronounce a curse on attempts by man to leave the Earth and seek immortality; whereas in CHILDHOOD’S END it is the earth that is destroyed when mankind achieves disembodied psionic union with the Overmind, and immortality and godlike powers.
In PERELENDRA such attempts space travel turn out to be literally the work of devils (for the scientist Weston in SILENT PLANET is now shown to be possessed by a fallen angel); and in THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH the ‘Dark Eldil’ tempt man to seek immortality through technology, and copy the practices of Sulva, the barren moon where nearly all organic life has been wiped out, in preference to artificial cybernetic existence. Whereas in CHILDHOOD’S END the devils (batwings and barbed tails and all) are the good guys, midwives whose mission is to usher mankind through a difficult period of evolution into godlike psi-powers, and the promise of immortality through science is kept.
Those of you who are keeping track of modern manifestations of ancient and ever-living heresies will recognize the odor wafting from CHILDHOOD’S END. It is Gnosticism, almost without disguise.
In the Gnostic myth, the serpent in Eden was a hero attempting to return Adam and Eve to a primordial unity with the Pleroma, the godhead, and the God of the Bible is a mere imposter, a criminal who tried to enslave them in the pleasant trap called Eden. In Gnosticism, as in the movies THE MATRIX or DARK CITY, the world around us is an illusion, a deception, and when we escape the deception, we shall become as gods, knowing good and evil, and shall live forever.
In CHILDHOOD’S END, the Overlords (winged devils) usher mankind gently into extinction so that the evolved children of men (let us call them Slans) the psychic supermen, the homo superior, will replace them. The Slans reject all human institutions, evolve beyond human comprehension, pull the moon out of orbit and, for no particular reason, destroy the Earth. Then they all fly off to join in oneness with a space being Clarke calls the Overmind, or, for those of you who recognize the older name, the Pleroma.
In Christian eschatology, the old heaven and earth is destroyed, but replaced by a new heaven and earth, shining and unstained, and the righteous are raised in glorified bodies. In Gnostic eschatology, matter is a radically evil trap, the old earth is a prison to be fled, or, better yet, and eggshell which the fledgling godling cracks. For the Christian, the Earth is sacred, if marred by man’s sin; for the Gnostic, the Earth is yesterday’s news. So, the Slans smashing the Earth at the end of CHILDHOOD’S END has a symbolic resonance to Gnostic myth.
A supernatural God is not the Deceiver in a science fiction story, since science fiction, properly so called, restricts its speculations to natural phenomena. When supernatural phenomena must come on stage in an SF book (which they do more often than not), they are called by parapsychological names, and assumed to be governed by understandable laws of nature. But God can be a deceptive idea: in one risibly naïve passage, Clarke has his devils give historians a magic television set which shows the past, and after a day or two, all religions in the world—but we all know he means one in particular—simply vanishes like dew drop in the sunlight. This is a Gnostic fantasy at its finest: not only is God not real, the idea is so feeble that is vanishes without the need to fight it.
By itself, this looks like atheism, but combined with the other spiritual and magical ideas in the book such as poltergeists, telepathy, precognition and such as the transcendence of mankind into the galactic Overmind, aka the Pleroma, CHILDHOOD’ S END takes on a Gnostic mood and theme, even if it is not literally Gnostic.
For those of you who think I am merely cracking wise to use the word Slans to refer to Clarke’s posthumans, let me remind you that a very similar theme crops up in the last chapter of A.E. Van Vogt’s seminal masterpiece SLAN. In that scene, Jommy Cross discovers that the hunted and persecuted Slans have been secretly guiding the ruling mankind, even though mankind wants nothing but to destroy the superior beings. The eventual fate of mankind is extinction: Mother Nature has a built-in molecular mechanism to insure homo sapiens will grow sterile and die off. So far, so good. The sinister note enters the scene when the benevolent dictator secretly ruling mankind mentions that the Slan mission is to guide outdated homo sapiens into its extinction as peacefully and gracefully as possible.
Boy, there is filial affection for your parent race for you. I hope whatever race replaces the Slans at the end of their evolutionary career euthanizes them with as much loving chloroform. (According to Pnakotic Manuscripts, the Great Race of Yith, who have examined our future, assure us on good authority that the Slans will be replaced by a Coleopterous race of intelligent beetles. Go, Darwin! Whoever comes after us is always better than us! The Morlocks agree!) The idea of a peaceful dieback by homo sapiens, departing like gentlemen with a tip of the hat and a stiff upper lip when our replacements arrive is not original to A.E. van Vogt, but first appeared (as far as I know) in the pages of DARKNESS AND LIGHT by Olaf Stapledon, a book where the protagonist from STARMAKER, views two possible futures of the human race: tyranny and extinction (a dark timeline) or socialist enlightenment and spiritual evolution (the light timeline). The light timeline ends with the far advanced future-humans gracefully surrendering the earth to their children, supermen whom they do not understand.
The Christian idea is that the righteous will be saved and will rise in glorified bodies at the Judgment, and, more important, that anyone can be saved, even if most, sadly, will not. The Gnostic idea is that the Benighted cannot be saved and no effort should be made to pass the secrets of Gnostic lore to them. Not even the Calvinists are so quick to condemn any effort to preach to the poor souls fated for damnation.
Ancient Gnosticism shares a contempt for the Benighted that modern Darwinians share for those races of mankind fated to fail the test of the survival of the fittest. After the destruction of Nazism in the Second World War, the ideal of Eugenics was disgraced, and institutions like Planned Parenthood rapidly shoved in the Memory Hole any reference to their doubleplusungood origins. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Nonetheless, traces of old Eugenics still crop up in the writing and thinking of anyone who acts as if Darwin were a moralist rather than a naturalist: and a contempt for the human race, particularly the desire to see the Superman sweep aside the Untermensch, is an inevitable mental growth from the seed of a Darwinian, rather than religious, view of human transcendence.
You would think science fiction writers, more than anyone, would know science is for investigating nature, and not for idolizing and worshipping. Science, real science, does not even pretend to promise transcendence, superhumanism, godhead, power or salvation. It promises us more and shinier toys. But now and again one comes across a science fiction book that seems to promise a scientific version of the Rapture and the Last Judgment.
As an answer to THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH, I personally find CHILDHOOD’S END to offer answers that are naïve, even dangerously so. C.S. Lewis predicted the outcome of attempting to rule mankind with a scientifically organized state with remarkable prescience. In contrast, the visions of Arthur C. Clarke of some transcendence ushered in by UFO people seems childish and unserious.
As Doris T. Meyers argues, C.S. Lewis is a science fiction writer of accomplishment equal or superior to others of his time, and lent to the field a moral seriousness and maturity it is often seen as lacking.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
