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C(live) S(taples) Lewis (1898-1963)
Out of the Silent Planet
London: John Lane, 1938; rpt. New York: Macmillan Paperbacks Editions, 1965. ISBN: 0-02-086910-X.
"'What do you mean by man?' ... 'I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like, and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a little, blind Oyarsa in your brain.... He has left you this one because a bent hnau can do more evil than a broken one.... Tell me, Thick One, why did you come here?' 'Me tell you. Make man live all the time.'" (138-39)
"'You say your Maleldil let all go dead. Other one, Bent One, he fight, jump, live — not all talkee-talkee. Me no care Maleldil. Like Bent One better: me on his side.'" (140)
"'Life ... has ruthlessly broken down all obstacles and liquidated all failures and today in her highest form — civilized man — and in me as his representative, she presses forward to that interplanetary leap which will, perhaps, place her forever beyond the reach of death.... I am prepared without flinching to plant the flag of man on Malacandra: to march on, step by step, superseding, where necessary, the lower forms of life that we find, claiming planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity — whatever strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed — dwell in the universe wherever the universe is habitable.... Me die. Man live.'" (136-37)
"'Does he think Maleldil wants a race to live for ever?' 'He does not know that there is any Maleldil.'" (123)
"There must be rule, yet how can creatures rule themselves? Beasts must be ruled by hnau and hnau by eldila and eldila by Maleldil. These creatures have no eldila." (102)
"'If you were subjects of Maleldil you would have peace.'" (140)
"'What are you so afraid of, Ransom of Thulcandra?' ... 'Of you, Oyarsa, because you are unlike me and I cannot see you.' ... 'Do not think we are utterly unlike. We are both copies of Maleldil.'" (119-20)
"A pleasure is full grown only when it is remembered. You are speaking, Hman, as if pleasure were one thing and the memory another. It is all one thing." (73)
"His brain reeled at the thought of the true population of the universe, the three-dimensional infinitude of their territory, and the unchronicled æons of their past; but his heart became steadier than it had ever been." (147)
"Oyarsa ... rules all nau ... and everything in Malacandra.... Oyarsa does not die ... and he does not breed. He is the one of his kind who was put into Malacandra to rule it when Malacandra was made. His body is not like ours, nor yours; it is hard to see and the light goes through it." (93)
"An Oyarses seems to be the 'intelligence' or tutelary spirit of a heavenly sphere ... of a planet.... 'Weston,' or the force or forces behind 'Weston,' will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one.... The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal.... It was Dr. Ransom who first saw that our only chance was to publish in the form of fiction what would certainly not be listened to as fact.... If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning." (152-54)
"If there is to be any more space-travelling, it will have to be time-travelling as well...!" (160)
"'Thulcandra is the world we do not know. It alone is outside the heaven, and no message comes from it.... Once we knew the Oyarsa of your world — he was brighter and greater than I — and then we did not call it Thulcandra.... It was in his mind to spoil other worlds besides his own.... There was a great war, and we drove him back out of the heavens and bound him in the air of his own world as Maleldil taught us. There doubtless he lies to this hour, and we know no more of that planet: it is silent. We think Maleldil would not give it up utterly to the Bent One, and there are stories among us that He has taken strange counsel and dared terrible things, wrestling with the Bent One in Thulcandra.'" (120-21)
"He was looking at a picture of the solar system.... The next ball ... must represent the Earth.... The ball was there, but where the flame-like figure should have been, a deep depression of irregular shape had been cut as if to erase it." (111)
"'I will show you Thulcandra.' ... He wondered for a moment if it might be Mars he was looking at; then ... he recognized ... Northern Europe and a piece of North America.... It was the Earth he was seeing.... 'That is my world.'" (96)
"Malacandra, then, was Mars." (112) "It had ceased to be Malacandra; it was only Mars." (146)
1. Who is the main character, and what is his profession? Describe his character. (Ch. 1: 13; Ch. 2: 17; Ch. 9: 55; Ch. 18: 119; Ch. 21: 142; Ch. 22: 152-53)
2. What is the setting? (Ch. 1: 8; Ch. 4: 26; Ch. 9: 55; Ch. 21: 146)
3. What is the silent planet? (Title; Ch. 11: 67; Ch. 15: 96; Ch. 18: 120-21)
4. Is it the white man's burden to bring civilization to primitive societies? (Ch. 2: 15; 5: 30)
5. How similar are Devine and Weston? In what ways are they different? ( Ch. 1: 12-14; Ch. 2: 15-17; Ch. 19: 126-30; Ch. 20: 133-41, 139*)
6. What is the setting in the third chapter? (Ch. 3: 21-24) Describe "space": is "space" a dark vacuum? (Ch. 4: 29; Ch. 5: 32; Ch. 6: 40)
7. What is "scientific idealism"? (Ch. 5: 30) Is the study of history/classics as important as science and the development of business skills? (Ch. 4: 27) Must "small claims give way to great" — like the life of an individual or the lives of a million individuals — for the "progress" of science?
8. Why do Weston and Devine kidnap Ransom? (Ch. 5: 34; Ch. 13: 82) Why do they misunderstand Oyarsa's request? (Ch. 20: 134, 138)
9. To what author does C. S. Lewis express gratitude, and what use does he make of this other author in Out of the Silent Planet? (Introductory Note; Ch. 5: 35; Ch. 11: 70)
10. Describe Malacandra. (Ch. 7: 41-46; Ch. 8: 48 ... )
11. Describe Ransom's meeting with the hross. (Ch. 9: 55-58) What is his name? (Ch. 11: 65) Describe the society of the hrossa. (Ch. 11: 66-67)
12. Who is Oyarsa? Who is Maleldil? Who is the Old One? What is an eldil? (Ch. 11: 67-68, 71; Ch. 12: 74-76; Ch. 13: 79, 83; Ch. 14: 85-86; Ch. 15: 93-95; Ch. 17: 108-11; Ch. 18: 117)
13. What are hnau? What is a hross? a séroni? a pfifltriggi? What is a Hman? Who is the ruler of the hnau? Is he a hnau? What is a hnakrapunti? (Ch. 11: 68-69; Ch. 13: 81; Ch. 16: 103)
14. According to the hrossa, what is "love"? What is memory? What is "bent"? (Ch. 12: 72-75)
15.
Cohen, Tal. "Tal Cohen's Bookshelf: A Collection of Personal
Opinions
About Books." http://www.forum2.org/tal/books/cosmic1.html
"I found the book's most important aspect to be the discussion on the
meaning of being hnau -- a conscious, intelligent being (human or
otherwise)."
Folks, Jeffrey J. "Telos and existence: ethics in C. S.
Lewis's space trilogy and Flannery O'Connor's Everything that
Rises Must Converge." The Southern Literary Journal 35.2
(Spring 2003): 107-28. Expanded
Academic
"As Christian authors, C. S. Lewis and Flannery O'Connor wrote from
within an antagonistic cultural context of twentieth-century secular
humanism....
Lewis's protagonist in the space trilogy, Professor Elwin Ransom, is a
character who understands the dangers of thoroughgoing philosophical
skepticism although he is also, at first, reluctant to commit his life
fully to virtue. In a crucial passage in Perelandra at the point at which
Ransom must decide to risk his life in opposing the seemingly invincible
power of Weston, Lewis evokes the decisive moment of ethical choice,
hinging on whether the individual will accept the truth that a single
life is always of infinite value in the sight of God....
What Weston lacks from beginning to end is a sense of humility that would
open his feelings toward the suffering of his fellow creatures, or even
toward his own mortality. Lacking Ransom's curiosity and concern, Weston
is incapable of looking and listening except in so far as he is gathering
data for his experiments, and thus he misses both the beauty of the
Malacandran and Perelandran landscapes and the virtues of their
inhabitants, as well as the potential beauty and virtue of Earth and its
people. Lewis's presentation of Weston is an implicit critique of the
moral failing of science, and more broadly of all humanistic learning,
when it is set up as self-sufficient, for by itself scientific
experimentation can never arrive at first principles."
Keefer, Sarah Larratt. "Houyhnhnms on Malacandra: C.S. Lewis and
Jonathan Swift." ANQ 7.4 (Oct 1994): 210-15.Expanded
Academic
"An examination of Lewis's hrossa in light of Swift's Houyhnhnms
demonstrates both an unacknowledged debt and perhaps something of Lewis's
own position in the debate over Houyhnhnm society....
'Man - Ren-soom,' said the sorn. [Ransom] noticed that it spoke
differently from the hrossa, without any suggestion of their persistent
initial H.... 'No, no, Small One. I have told you [Oyarsa] rules all nau''
(so he pronounced hnau) 'and everything in Malacandra.' ... 'I will carry
you,' said the sorn. 'You are too small a one to make the journey yourself
and I will gladly go to Meldilorn. The hrossa should not have sent you
this way.' ...
It is ... the presence of the Oyarsa, the archon or "archangel" of
Malacandra, and of an unquestioning acknowledgment of Maleldil the Younger
and the Old One, that sets the Malacandrian society apart forever from
its initial inspiration in Houyhnhnmland. Try as he might, Ransom cannot
discover a Malacandrian hierarchy; there is none, because of an inherent
sense of creature equality....
When the Oyarsa of Malacandra describes humans as it perceives them to be,
we find that its words apply equally well to the "perfect" society of the
Houyhnhnms:
'I see now how the lord of the silent world has bent you. There are laws
that all hnau know, of pity and straight dealing and shame and the like,
and one of these is the love of kindred. He has taught you to break all of
them except this one, which is not one of the greatest laws; this one he
has bent till it becomes folly and has set it up, thus bent, to be a
little, blind Oyarsa in your brain. And now you can do nothing but obey
it.'"
Schwartz, Sanford. "Paradise Reframed: Lewis, Bergson, and
Changing Times on Perelandra." Christianity and Literature
51.4 (Summer 2002): 569-603.
"In the first novel [of the Perelandra trilogy], Out of the
Silent Planet (1938), the Christian
protagonist, Elwin Ransom, contends with the imperial designs of two
ambitious villains--the physicist Weston and the businessman Devine--who
take for granted their own evolutionary superiority and regard it as
sufficient warrant for the subordination or conquest of others."
Vanderpool, Hugo H. "Obtusetheater.com." http://www.obtusetheater.com/reviews/lewis.htm
"In a gripping scene before he leaves, Ransom learns why Earth is known
as the "silent planet" and the answer is nothing more than the Fall and
the loss of Eden.... Lewis's underlying Christian message remains strong
throughout the series and is very unique to the genre of science fiction.
He began the trilogy as a rebuttal to Evolutionism, a pilosophy that
projects Darwinism beyond the metaphysical sphere, speculating that
humankind may eventually evolve into its own species of divinity, jumping
from planet to planet and star to star."