To my pre-Christian eyes it was exciting science fiction and nothing more the author’s name meant nothing to me. Once upon a time, as an undergraduate, single and far from home, I spent an hallucinatory afternoon, and having slept past noon at the end of a long working summer in my twentieth year, and awakened to pick up a friend’s battered paperback of Out of the Silent Planet, I began to scan it. Long available only in tiny individual hardbacks or a few endlessly repeated paperback editions, at last there is a volume of Lewis’s science-fiction masterpieces to set on the shelf beside The Faerie Queene, the Mort’ d’Arthur, and The Lord of the Rings as essential books of fantasy for adults. It is a unique thing, full of stars, cold and heat, flowers of the planets and a sharp sardonic sense of humour. It is of thrilling interest as a story, but it is more than that it is a kind of poem, and it has the great virtue of improving as it goes along. As Sir Hugh Walpole said of Out of the Silent Planet (1938), one may say of the complete trilogy, [This review originally appeared as “A Unique Thing.” Mythlore 17.1 (#63) (1990): 45-46.Īt Last! A handsome volume with a beautiful dustjacket by Brian Froud presenting the entire Ransom trilogy or Interplanetary trilogy, or, as phrased here, The Cosmic Trilogy of C.S. The Cosmic Trilogy: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
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