Lewis, C S
Entry updated 25 November 2024. Tagged: Author, Critic.
(1898-1963) UK author and critic, born in Belfast; he saw active service in the trenches during World War One; he was a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925-1954, and finally Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. His very early works – Dymer (1926 chap) as by Clive Hamilton, a highly metaphysical Utopian fantasy couched as a book-length narrative poem – came before his conversion to Christianity. Most of his later writing, whether directly or indirectly, was Christian apologetics; this was as true of his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) as of the fantasy The Screwtape Letters (1942; exp vt The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast 1961), in which an older devil writes letters of advice to a younger, devising various means of winning human souls. In Oxford Lewis was friendly with Charles Williams (another Anglican) and J R R Tolkien (a Roman Catholic). All three were Christian moralists with a strong interest in allegory or fantasy, and (with others, including Owen Barfield, an Anthroposophist) they formed a casual society, the Inklings, during whose meetings they read to each other from works in progress.
Lewis's most popular fiction is for children, and is allegorical Fantasy, although it uses many sf devices, including Time Travel, other Dimensions and Parallel Worlds. The kingdom of Narnia, to which various human children travel, is ruled by a lion, Aslan, who is "crucified" by a wicked witch. There are many excitingly described perils, most with a direct Christian allegorical application. Widely loved by children as straightforward fantasy, the series is: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and His Boy (1954), The Magician's Nephew (1955), which comes first in terms of the internal chronology, and The Last Battle (1956), a Carnegie Medal winner; for resortings of this material see Checklist. Omnibuses include Prince Caspian & The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (omni 1990) and Tales of Narnia: The Silver Chair & The Last Battle (omni 1990). Two fantasies for adults are The Great Divorce: A Dream (1945 chap), a minor allegory about Heaven and Hell in which Posthumous Fantasy [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below] reverts tamely back to dream; and Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (1956), a dark retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche which some of his admirers consider his best work.
Lewis's primary contribution to sf proper is the Ransom sequence (also known as the Cosmic Trilogy) about the linguist Dr Ransom, who like Christ is at one point offered as a ransom for mankind: Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus 1953), and That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (1945; cut 1955; cut version vt The Tortured Planet 1958). The first two novels are Planetary Romances with elements of medieval mythology, in which Ransom travels unwillingly (abducted aboard a human-built Spaceship) to Mars and then willingly (transported in a casket seemingly made of ice) to Venus. Each planet is seen as having a tutelary spirit, an angel or "eldil"; those of our Solar System's other planets are both good and accessible, while that of Earth is fallen, twisted, not known directly by most humans, but identified with the biblical Satan. These two books are powerfully imagined, although their scientific content is intermittently absurd. The effect of lesser Gravity on Martian plant and animal life is rendered with great economy and vividness, as is Ransom's first sight of the water world of Venus, a rich exercise in Perception; in a passage as purely evocative of an alien Sense of Wonder as anything in sf, Ransom's human eyes cannot at first make sense of the strangeness about him, of the interweaving planet-wide Archipelago of natural rafts where by divine command the Venusian Adam and Eve are required to dwell. The religious allegory of Perelandra, however, in which an evil and demonically possessed Scientist plays Satanic tempter to the female ruler of Venus (see Adam and Eve), is deeply conservative and also – in its courtly, romantic (and some may think dehumanizing) view of womanhood – sexist. Eve, as a young woman who has of course not encountered Evil, cannot possibly withstand the argument of Evil and it is left to Ransom to counter the Tempter with physical violence. Lewis's ideology of Gender is spelled out in detail in a number of essays and in the critical book A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), which can be seen as a template for Perelandra.
The third volume, That Hideous Strength, is a Scientific Romance set on contemporary Earth, and though it amply employs the toolkit of that form is at the same time more directly occult in its use of genre machinery than either of its predecessors; there are echoes of Lewis's friend Charles Williams. The fury of Lewis's attack on scientific "humanism" or "scientism" (science directed towards purely worldly ends) is very nearly unbalanced, and leads to grossly melodramatic caricature of Scientists and government-supported research units in general, and of H G Wells in particular, here grotesquely envisaged as the vulgar and uncomprehending cockney journalist, Jules. The horrifically unpleasant N.I.C.E. or National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments is directed by dark eldils or demons which communicate through a disembodied head unpleasantly kept "alive" by scientific devices (see Brain in a Box). Ultimately, the human (but self-dehumanized) N.I.C.E. leaders and its complicit rank and file are destroyed by various means including released experimental animals, and the Institute itself by the fire of otherworld eldils – the planetary spirits of Mercury, Mars, Venus, Jupiter and Saturn (see Outer Planets), convened by Ransom and operating through a reawakened Merlin [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. The book's attack on government indifference to Ecology won it a new audience in the late 1960s. Lewis's attitude towards any form of modernism was neatly encapsulated by a remark he made during a lecture on medieval poetry in 1938: "And then the Renaissance came and spoiled everything." The three books are collected as The Cosmic Trilogy (omni 1990).
Some of Lewis's minor essays in and about sf, including a transcript of a talk with Brian W Aldiss and Kingsley Amis, can be found in the posthumous Of Other Worlds (coll 1966) edited by Walter Hooper (1931-2020), which includes two stories originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and two previously unpublished pieces including "Forms of Things Unknown", in which an astronaut fatally encounters a Gorgon on the Moon (see William Sambrot and links below). A later posthumous work is The Dark Tower and Other Stories (coll 1977) edited by Hooper, the unfinished title story being linked to the Ransom sequence and apparently written circa 1939. It is an abandoned follow-up to Out of the Silent Planet, featuring mental Time Travel (in accordance with the then fashionable theories of J W Dunne) to an only partly sketched Far Future Dystopia where a replica of Cambridge University Library, the Dark Tower, is the setting for events containing a disturbing vein of perhaps unconscious sexual symbolism. For whatever reason, Lewis himself chose neither to complete nor to publish this curious fragment, and instead continued the Ransom books with Perelandra.
It was strongly suggested by Kathryn Lindskoog (1934-2003) in The C.S. Lewis Hoax (1988) that the Reverend Hooper – Lewis's secretary for only one month – forged various items of posthumously published Lewis material included in The Dark Tower, a charge which has been strenuously (and in the end effectively) denied. Lindskoog offered a vigorous counter-rebuttal in "The Dark Scandal: Science Fiction Forgery" (Summer/Fall 1992 Quantum #42), but in that year it was revealed that she herself had been forging letters to do with the Hooper issue – indeed, she admitted as much, though she described her fourteen forged letters as a lighthearted "prank". What there can be no doubt about is that much of the work assembled by Hooper has affected readers as being both sexually poisonous and egregiously amateur. [PN/DRL]
see also: Aliens; Anti-Intellectualism in SF; Children's SF; Conceptual Breakthrough; Eschatology; Fantastic Voyages; Gods and Demons; Horror in SF; Islands; Life on Other Worlds; Linguistics; Living Worlds; The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction; Magic; Mainstream Writers of SF; Messiahs; Mythology; Religion; Secret Masters; Social Darwinism.
Clive Staples Lewis
born Belfast, Northern Ireland: 29 November 1898
died Oxford, Oxfordshire: 22 November 1963
works
series
Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy
- Out of the Silent Planet (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938) [Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: hb/Harold Jones]
- Perelandra (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1943) [Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: hb/B Cowell]
- Voyage to Venus (London: Pan Books, 1953) [vt of the above: Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: pb/Carl Wilton]
- That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1945) [Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: hb/John Reginald Biggs]
- That Hideous Strength (London: Pan Books, 1955) [cut version of the above: Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: pb/Sax]
- The Tortured Planet (New York: Avon Books, 1958) [vt of above: Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: pb/Richard Powers]
- The Cosmic Trilogy (London: The Bodley Head, 1990) [omni of the above three: Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: hb/Brian Froud]
- Out of the Silent Planet/Perelandra/That Hideous Strength (New York: Science Fiction Book Club, 2000) [vt of the above: Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: hb/Kinuko Y Craft]
- That Hideous Strength (London: Pan Books, 1955) [cut version of the above: Ransom/Cosmic Trilogy: pb/Sax]
Narnia (omnis are selected)
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1950) [Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- Prince Caspian (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1951) [Narnia: hb/Pauline Baynes]
- The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader" (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1952) [Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- Tales of Narnia (London: Collins, 1987) [omni of the above three: Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- Tales of Narnia: Prince Caspian & The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: Lion, 1989) [omni of the above two: Narnia: pb/]
- The Silver Chair (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1953) [Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- The Horse and His Boy (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1954) [Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- The Magician's Nephew (London: The Bodley Head, 1955) [Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- Three Books from the Chronicles of Narnia (London: Collins, 1996) [omni of the above two plus The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe: Narnia: hb/Pauline Baynes]
- The Last Battle: A Story for Children (London: The Bodley Head, 1956) [Narnia: illus/hb/Pauline Baynes]
- Tales of Narnia: The Silver Chair & The Last Battle (London: W H Smith, 1990) [omni of the above plus The Silver Chair: hb/]
- The Chronicles of Narnia: With the Lion of Judah in Never-Never Land (New York: Religious Book Club, 1973) [omni of the above seven: published in two volumes: Narnia: hb/]
- The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 1998) [vt of the above: Narnia: hb/Pauline Baynes]
- The Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 2001) [vt of the above: Narnia: hb/Cliff Nielsen]
- The Complete Chronicles of Narnia (New York: HarperCollins, 1998) [vt of the above: Narnia: hb/Pauline Baynes]
individual titles
novels and other fictions
- Dymer (London: J M Dent and Sons, 1926) as by Clive Hamilton [poem: hb/R L Knowles]
- The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism (London: J M Dent and Sons, 1933) [hb/Thomas Derrick]
- The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity Reason and Romanticism (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943) [rev of the above: hb/Thomas Derrick]
- The Screwtape Letters (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1942) [hb/nonpictorial]
- The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1961) [exp vt as coll: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1945) [chap: hb/nonpictorial]
- Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956) [hb/John Reginald Biggs]
- Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (London: Collins, 1985) [written circa 1905-1910: edited by Walter Hooper: hb/C S Lewis]
collections
- Of Other Worlds (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966) [coll: edited by Walter Hooper: hb/nonpictorial]
- The Dark Tower and Other Stories (London: Collins, 1977) [coll: edited by Walter Hooper: hb/Reg Boorer]
- The Essential C S Lewis (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1988) [coll: edited by Lyle W Dorsett: hb/]
- The Collected Poems of C S Lewis: A Critical Edition (Kent: Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2015) [poetry: coll: hb/]
nonfiction (selected)
- The Allegory of Love: A Study of the Mediaeval Tradition (Oxford, Oxfordshire: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1936) [hb/nonpictorial]
- On Stories, and Other Essays in Literature (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1982) [nonfiction: coll: edited by Walter Hooper: hb/]
- Of This and Other Worlds (London: Collins, 1984) [vt of the above: hb/]
works as editor
- Essays Presented to Charles Williams (London: Oxford University Press, 1947) [anth: edited anonymously by C S Lewis: including first publication of "On Fairy-Stories" by J R R Tolkien: hb/nonpictorial]
about the author
Very many book-length studies of Lewis's life and work exist, perhaps the most distinguished biography being C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990) by A N Wilson. Further biographical material appears in Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman (1985) by Brian Sibley, whose germ was a television script by Sibley and Norman Stone titled I Call It Joy. This script inspired or was developed into William Nicholson's television drama Shadowlands (1985), which also became a successful stage play 1989-1990 and was filmed as Shadowlands (1993), directed by Richard Attenborough, screenplay by Nicholson, with Anthony Hopkins as Lewis and Debra Winger as Joy. A selection of C S Lewis studies appears below.
- Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969) [nonfiction: anth: contains an entertaining and passionate attack on Lewis by the Marxist biologist and author J B S Haldane: hb/nonpictorial]
- Humphrey Carpenter. The Inklings: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams and Their Friends (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1978) [nonfiction: hb/nonpictorial]
- Brian Sibley. Shadowlands: The Story of C.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1985) [nonfiction: pb/]
- Peter J Schakel, editor. The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1977) [nonfiction: anth: hb/]
- Chad Walsh. The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1979) [nonfiction: hb/]
- C N Manlove. C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Kathryn Lindskoog. The C S Lewis Hoax (Portland, Oregon: Multnomah Press, 1988) [nonfiction: hb/Bruce DeRoos]
- A N Wilson. C.S. Lewis: A Biography (London: Collins, 1990) [nonfiction: hb/]
- Cath Filmer-Davies. Towards a "Good Death": The Fantasy Fiction of C S Lewis and the Experience of Reading (Newcastle, New South Wales: Nimrod Publications, 1997) [nonfiction: chap: in the publisher's Babel Handbooks on Fantasy and SF Writers series: pb/uncredited]
- Laura Miller. The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2008) [nonfiction: hb/Olaf Hajek]
- Leah Wilson and Herbie Brennan, editors. Through the Wardrobe: Your Favorite Authors on C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia (Dallas, Texas: BenBella Books, 2008) [nonfiction: anth: pb/]
- Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski. The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J R R Tolkien, C S Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015) [nonfiction: hb/Donna Cheng]
- John Hendrix. The Mythmakers: The Remarkable Fellowship of C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien (New York: Abrams Fanfare 2024) [nonfiction: graph: illus/hb/John Hendrix]
links
- C S Lewis
- C S Lewis Foundation
- Into the Wardrobe (fan site)
- Internet Speculative Fiction Database
- Project Gutenberg
- The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: Gorgons; Merlin; Posthumous Fantasy.
- Picture Gallery
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