Ramblings on Out of the Silent Planet

The lovely Maidens of Green Gables are hosting a Faith Filled Fiction Blog Party – do hop over and check it out! As you may have deduced from the post title, I have decided to write about Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis. (First I was going to write an actual real review of it, then I was at least going to write a semi-structured post about Christian symbolism within it. But my brain Was Not Cooperating, so instead, here are random ramblings on Out of the Silent Planet for your reading pleasure.)

Although I think Perelandra is objectively the best of the Space Trilogy, and objectively my favorite, Out of the Silent Planet (hereafter abbreviated to OotSP; I could have done OSP, but OotSP looks funny and that pleases me) might be my favorite to read. It’s the coziest and most fun, and I am all for cozy and fun. As we would expect when C.S. Lewis is involved, however, OotSP is by no means a shallow science-fiction romp. C.S. Lewis goes in for allegory a good deal, as can be seen in the Chronicles of Narnia (though in the Space Trilogy, I’m not even sure you could call it allegory…since, within the story, it’s not exactly that truths are expressed through symbols; the truths are really happening, they just look different because the story takes place in a different world).

Now, for some random thoughts/musings on OotSP:

~ In constructing Malacandra (Mars, to we earthlings), Lewis had two distinct world-building concerns to deal with: creating a realistic interpretation of an un-fallen world, and creating a realistic interpretation of a planet with a completely different culture from ours. Both of these are balanced nicely. Purely from a geographical standpoint, Lewis paints a landscape which is attractive yet alien to our own experience, which fits in with both concerns. Lewis also chooses to people Malacandra with three different intelligent species that live in harmony with each other and complement each other – which also fits in with both concerns. All in all, in OotSP we encounter a world which is truly alien, but not grotesque.

~ Also, I think Lewis struck the ideal balance in creating our protagonist, Ransom; he both serves as a sort of “every-man” that we can understand and sympathize with, but is also brave enough, intelligent enough, and moral enough to serve as a fitting sort of ambassador of mankind to the Malacandrians. (Technically Weston and Devine were really the first ambassadors, but although they (sadly) give a pretty good picture of what humanity is often like, I would much rather be represented by Ransom, thank you very much.)

~ Speaking of Weston and Devine, I like that we’re given an accurate portrayal of the two main sorts of villainy in our two antagonists. Devine is the shallow kind of villain: he’s just looking to increase his own wealth, power, and luxury. Weston is the more complex kind of villain, the villain with a cause (in this case, the cause of opening up the way for humans to be able to “planet-hop,” to move to another planet when at some point in the future Earth begins to fail as a life-giving planet). Ironically, as Oyarsa points out, although Weston is so concerned with the future of humanity, he is not concerned at all with humans as individuals – the whole reason that Ransom is on Malacandra at all is because Weston and Devine kidnapped him and brought him there, under the impression that the Malacandrians wanted a human sacrifice. (They actually didn’t, by-the-by.) I find it very interesting – and since C.S. Lewis was a smart man, I doubt this was a coincidence – that Weston has his view of humanity pretty much exactly backwards. You can’t actually care about humanity as a whole without first caring about humans individually and personally. Weston didn’t really love humanity, he loved the idea of humanity.

~ I think it’s fascinating that on Malacandra, an un-fallen world, we still have the presence of the hnakra, a ferocious beast…and, what is more, that the hrossa – who are un-fallen intelligent creatures – hunt this beast and delight in hunting it. I think the point that Lewis is making here is that the love of risk and danger – even the pride and sense of accomplishment in killing something dangerous – is not, in itself, bad or unwholesome. Since we of the Silent Planet live in a fallen world, we often experience these desires in unwholesome ways, but the inhabitants of Malacandra can experience these emotions as they were meant to be: though they long to kill the hnakra, it’s not really because they bear any malice toward him; though each of them longs to have the honor of being the one to slay the hnakra, there is no envy or jealousy or unfair play, etc.

~ Tied into that, it’s interesting to see that sorrow does not seem to be unknown on Malacandra…death, for instance, is still present. I think this points to two things: one, even an unfallen world is not Heaven, and two: there can be occasions when sorrow is not necessarily a bad thing. (That being said, my understanding has always been that there would have been neither sorrow nor death on Earth if it weren’t for the Fall…so I may differ with Lewis in this point. Then again, just because that’s the way it was on Earth, does that mean it would be that way on another planet? I really don’t know.)

~ As an evangelization tool, I think it was genius of Lewis to set this in a different world. If he spoke of religion, of our fallen world, of angels and spiritual struggles, many readers would just tune it out and think it more “religious jaw” (to quote Mere Christianity). But because this is set in a different world, he can use different words to mean what is really the same thing, and people are interested.

~ It’s interesting that, although we see so many similarities spiritually between our world and Malacandra, we see something on Malacandra which we have no equivalent to on Earth: Oyarsa, a sort of guardian angel of the planet. That’s what makes Earth the Silent Planet – we have no Oyarsa to communicate with the Oyarsas of other worlds. It seems that Lucifer (the Bent One, as the Malacandrians call him – having no word for “evil,” since their world is un-fallen) would have been our Oyarsa, if he hadn’t rebelled – putting our whole planet in rebellion against good.

Well, that’s just scratching the surface of the musings OotSP can spark, but even ramblings must stop somewhere. What are some of your ramblings on Out of the Silent Planet?