That Hideous Strength

This is the third and final book in C.S. Lewis's amazing Space Trilogy. This book was written as a sequel to the immensely popular Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra but Lewis also wrote it so that the story can stand on its own. So if you haven't read the first, you can start here. That Hideous Strength, unlike the first 2 books in this series, where Ransom leaves earth and fights evil in space and on other planets, the battle in this book takes place on earth. Ransom must lead a group of faithful believers against National Institute for Coordinated Experiments or N.I.C.E., an organization that believes that Science can solve all of humanity's problems. He must battle the people in this organization, super aliens trying to invade and control earth and use its population against other planets and against God. On top of all of that, Merlin has arisen from his long sleep and has arisen in England's time of greatest need. But the question is, who will find him first - N.I.C.E. or Ransom and his team? The fate of the world, and possibly the universe, rests on this question. Lewis called this story an adult's fairy-tale. It is a mix of sci-fi and fantasy, and a book that will keep your attention as you raptly turn the pages to find out where Lewis will lead you.

Having enjoyed this novel again and again for a generation, I believe that it is prophetic and even more relevant today than when it was written. Now that recent filmings of Lord of the Ring and the first Narnia book have delighted critics and the public alike, is it too much to hope for a high-quality cinematic version someday of _That Hideous Strength_? Lewis would be most pleased, I daresay, if any such adaptation were set in our own time, because we need its messsage now. By the time Mark Studdock arrives at Belbury, he is a confirmed brown-nose with considerable experience in pursuing his life's ambition: joining the esoteric Inner Circle of whatever. It is striking, then, how much difficulty he has in the NICE even determining who is in this group. Feverstone, Filostrato, Hardcastle, and Straik, for instance, all confide to him that their own respective purviews are of the institute's essence, while various other departments are peripheral or merely for public consumption. By the end of the book, the chaos proclaims that none of these figures, nor anyone else, is effectively in charge. In this respect, Lewis brilliantly anticipated insights that the late William Stringfellow would articulate in the 1960s and 70s: that institutions are among the contemporary world's most characteristic manifestations of the demonic "powers and principalities" mentioned in the Bible. They inevitably take on lives of their own and go off the rails. Eventually they justify any and all means towards the end of their own survival and hegemony. They enslave and "deplete the personhood of" every human being involved with them-- even (and perhaps especially) those who imagine that they are in control. Of course, the church as an institution being hardly exempt from these problems, clergy would react to Stringfellow's analysis with hostility proportionate to their power. Ironically, the works of this theologian long lay in unread obscurity in seminary: while students in, of all places, law school continued to turn to them when they wanted to learn how corporate structures really operate. As we 21st-century Americans find ourselves steeped in the waking nightmare of an unfolding vindication of Stringfellow's prophetic thought, it is heartening at least to see a growing interest in it-- books lately republished and his ideas taken up and further developed e.g. by Walter Wink. For an illustrative novel, however, _That Hideous Strength_, written by C.S. Lewis some 25 years earlier, may yet be unsurpasssed. Some commentators have incomprehensibly indicated that the NICE people were materialists. Pas du tout. They are probably ex-materialists, but by the time we meet them are devotees of the occult. The reader grasps the inevitability of this progression. As Muggeridge (and perhaps Chesterton earlier) observed, those who cease to believe in God don't believe in nothing. Rather, before long they'll believe in anything. Lewis must have been aware of th

C.S. Lewis would not have named this series the Space Trilogy. He used the term Deep Heaven for "the packed reality that men call empty space." Everyone else doesn't have a problem with the title so much as the fact that the boxed set of the three books is continually out of print. Of the three books, I think the second, Perelandra, alternately called Voyage to Venus, is the best. Yet the effect of reading the trilogy together and in order is better than that book alone. The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is gripping so far as it goes. A friend of mine said the second book, Perelandra, was the best book she'd ever read. But I'd never considered the third book, That Hideous Strength on its own merits until I read an essay by philosophy prof Richard Purtill entitled "That Hideous Strength: A Double Tale." Before that I viewed the last book as starting rather slow, even though it picks up half way through and pulls the three books through to a dazzling ending. The trilogy is written at a higher reading level than the Narnian Chronicles (the latter were meant for kids), although it's arguably easier to read than The Lord of the Rings. Note: Purtill's essay is scheduled to be included in the revised edition of Lord of the Elves and Eldils: Philosophy and Fantasy in Lewis and Tolkien due out sometime in 2006, along with his most popular essay, "Did C.S. Lewis Lose His Faith?" which argues against the view implied in the film Shadowlands that he did. The Narnian film may be introducing readers to the books, which, whatever one thinks of the film, is a good thing. But readers closing the Chronicles will be glad to find their way into Lewis' Deep Heaven and the rest of his fiction.

C. S. Lewis wraps up his "Space Trilogy" right back on planet Earth where it is up to a cadre of ordinary folks, mythical beings, and brute beasts to thwart the forces of supreme wickedness. With the assistance of the Director--a man familiar to readers of the previous two books in the trilogy--this strange collection of characters is pitted against a vaguely-familiar, propaganda-driven totalitarian regime ironically called by the acronym NICE. This book is Lewis at his satirical best--an uppercut landed to the jaw of secular, anti-family, "post-christian" society.What is particularly striking about this book is who Lewis fingers as the advance-guard for the evil that sadly dominates on Earth, ever trying to extend its power: a bunch of place-seeking, ethics-free, jive-talking academics who have long left any pretense to reason and science behind. Instead, they are driven by a misguided altruism that manifests itself, ultimately, as complete misanthropy.In this regard, Lewis must be regarded as prescient. Anyone who has spent any time in American academia will immediately sympathize with the plight of the characters in the book who *dare* to stand up to the censorial, elitist, marxist/leninist, anti-religion, pro-death agenda so prevalent among the "progressive" leadership of the university. Lewis had these people's number fifty years ago.In short, this book is a fun read and though couched in humorous terms, is deadly serious at its core.