Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Key to Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell and the Language of Utopia
- 2 Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come
- 3 Re-visions of The Time Machine
- 4 Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text
- 5 Karel Čapek's Can(n)on of Negation
- 6 Olaf Stapledon's Tragi-Cosmic Vision
- 7 C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’
- 8 Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan
- 9 Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Time
- 10 ‘Elsewhere Elsewhen Otherwise’: Italo Calvino's Cosmicomic Tales
- 11 Ursula K. Le Guin and Time's Dispossession
- 12 Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
- Afterword: A Revisionary Construction of Genre, with Particular Reference to Science Fiction
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
7 - C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Key to Abbreviations
- Acknowledgments
- Preface
- 1 Swift, Zamyatin, and Orwell and the Language of Utopia
- 2 Generic Configurations of A Story of the Days to Come
- 3 Re-visions of The Time Machine
- 4 Stanislaw Lem's Futurological Congress as a Metageneric Text
- 5 Karel Čapek's Can(n)on of Negation
- 6 Olaf Stapledon's Tragi-Cosmic Vision
- 7 C. S. Lewis and the Fictions of ‘Scientism’
- 8 Kurt Vonnegut, Historiographer of the Absurd: The Sirens of Titan
- 9 Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinths of Time
- 10 ‘Elsewhere Elsewhen Otherwise’: Italo Calvino's Cosmicomic Tales
- 11 Ursula K. Le Guin and Time's Dispossession
- 12 Time Out of Joint: The World(s) of Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle
- Afterword: A Revisionary Construction of Genre, with Particular Reference to Science Fiction
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
In vain did Ransom try to remember that he had been in ‘space’ and found it Heaven…. The opposite mode of thought[,] which he had often mocked and called in mockery The Empirical Bogey, came surging into his mind – the great myth of our century with its gases and galaxies, its light years and evolutions, its nightmare perspectives of simple arithmetic in which everything that can possibly hold significance for the mind becomes the mere by-product of essential disorder.
Perelandra (13:173)[T]he colonization of space and the mechanization of the body are obviously complementary.
J. D. Bernal (61)Nevill Coghill reports that in talking with C. S. Lewis one day, the conversation turned to the topic of writing for a ‘popular American weekly.’ Coghill, in a tone of wonderment not entirely disingenuous, asked his colleague how he knew ‘what to write or what to say.’ ‘Oh,’ Lewis replied,
‘they have somehow got the idea that I am an unaccountably paradoxical dog, and they name the subject on which they want me to write; and they pay generously.’ ‘And so you set to work and invent a few paradoxes?’ ‘Not a bit of it. What I do is to recall, as well as I can, what my mother used to say on the subject, eke it out with a few similar thoughts of my own, and so produce what would have been strict orthodoxy in about 1900. And this seems to them outrageously paradoxical, avant garde stuff.’ (Coghill, 64)
This retort, being itself something of a performative utterance, gives an inkling of how outrageous Lewis could be. It gives no indication, however, of the moral outrage which can motivate his outrageousness; nor does it otherwise prepare us for the ‘paradoxical … stuff’ to be met with in what he himself designates as the trilogy consisting of Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Perelandra (1943), and That Hideous Strength (1945).
Black Magic as ‘Scientism’
The last-named work in particular may strike readers not predisposed to sympathize with Lewis-the-Christian-Apologist as being outré, or over the top. This becomes especially apparent from the standpoint of genre.
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- Visions and Re-Visions(Re)constructing Science Fiction, pp. 135 - 149Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2005