Out of the Silent Planet & Perelandra

I finished C.S. Lewis’ Out of the Silent Planet book, which Sudi Claus brought to me on Christmas Eve, and I enjoyed it very much. He wrote it many years before his Narnia series (published in the 30’s). It’s sci-fi, not pure fantasy. I read it because I like C.S. Lewis’ style of fiction in the Narnia books. I found though that this book was of a completely different type of writing. The themes of good and evil forces and biblical allusions were there but the characters and worlds are very different. It’s not a “funny” book or a particularly heart-warming story like Narnia (though the “good” characters are equally noble) but more of an exploration of extraterrestrial and philosophical “what ifs”. It seems to me that this first book in the series (three books in the “Space Trilogy” series) serves primarily as a foundation for the rest of the series (the last book is several times thicker than each of the first two).

The style of the series has definitely grown on me and I’m excited about continuing with Perelandra (Sudi suprised me with the other two books last night :). It’s very interesting how the first book ends by revealing that it was written in third person by somebody (only named as “Lewis”) who met Ransom (the main character) after the fact and makes you wonder if the whole story really did happen by explaining that they published the tale as fiction because they figured nobody would believe it. Then, in the second book, it is the author of the first book narrating in first person where he himself comes into the adventure with Ransom and what they do next (I’m only on chapter two so I don’t know what that adventure will be yet…).

I never thought I’d be saying this, but I love reading! And the thought crossed my mind to write and illustrate a fantasy book someday (put it in my big fat Goals.txt file).