Out of the Silent Planet

Oh, my dear Wyrmwood.

And also, C.S. Lewis wrote three, a science fiction trilogy, the space trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Paralandra, and That Hideous Strength.

So I'm a huge C.S. Lewis fan, but I spent two years of my life steeped in C.S. Lewis and all the special features on the deluxe set of Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

My team, we filmed all that.

Lewis and he loves science fiction way more than I do.

So he read this book called Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis, and he knew it would be a little too sci-fi for me.

But he sent me a couple of pages and I have not been able to stop thinking about them.

So I wanted to share them with you and they essentially are about Memory and pleasure and presence, right? And so it's a little bit lengthy, and I'm not giving you a lot of context, and there's some weird character names in here, and this is why I've been reluctant to even talk about this passage, even though it's really affected me in a beautiful way, is because...

And so, I don't know.

It's just beautiful.

Again, that's from Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis.

I haven't even read the book, so I'm probably missing a lot of context here, but it was just so beautiful to me.

And I find that the best way to actually force myself to read something is to teach it.

And so last summer, I did a Ransom Trilogy class where across about, I think, nine weeks, we did Out of the Silent Planet, Paralandra, and The Hideous Strength.

It was glorious.

There was no grading.

I really, really like C.S. Lewis, and he kind of speaks to me like, I think racially owing to, uh, my own heritage.

Although, uh, C.S. Lewis was a Catholic, uh, convert, but, um, he was very, very English, understood the English character better than almost anybody, okay? My favorite book of his is "That Hideous Strength." It's the final chapter-- It's the sequel to, um, [coughs] "Out of the Silent Planet," you know, um, and it's part of, like, his space series, and it follows some of the same characters, but it, it doesn't have to do with, with space.

Although some of, like, the-- some of the deities and things that feature in the earlier books of the space trilogy feature in it.

But, like, briefly, it's about this young academic in, like, literally as World War II's ending.

Uh, his first major work on Christianity was "The Pilgrim's Regress," which came out in the mid-1930s, only about five years or so after his conversion.

And then in the late 1930s, he wrote his space trilogy, and starting with "Out of the Silent Planet." And then, uh, in 1939, he published "The Problem of Pain," and that was the-- probably the most popular work that he had yet produced.

Uh, in 1942, he would publish what became an even more popular work, "The Screwtape Letters." But it was based on "The Problem of Pain" that the BBC reached out to him.

Uh, the BBC at the time was trying to come up with wholesome, non-controversial broadcasting to give to the public during World War II.

There are a million reader's guides, books, style books for things like The Scrutate Letters or Mere Christianity.

But I remember I had started Out of the Silent Planet, I think in probably about season three of the podcast.

I hadn't read it before, and I was utterly unprepared for what I was about to read.

I heard he did a science fiction trilogy, so I was expecting Star Wars, and it wasn't like that at all.

Yeah, it's...

It's a very different sort of book to the previous two.

You know, The Out of the Silent Planet, Perilandra, and The Hideous Strength.

They're all very, very different books.

I read them all, I was like, let's do them.

There's been a slight delay, but hopefully worth doing because this is a great book and it's even better, most people would say, than Out of the Silent Planet.

I would agree with this.

I would agree with this.

One of the things that I loved so much about Out of the Silent Planet was the fact that C.S. Lewis entirely surprised me because I entirely bought into Ransom's expectations of what he would find on Malacandra, which, you know, just a planet of alien life and danger and death.

And it wasn't like that at all.

What you find from Out of the Silent Planet is that Earth is the outlier.

Earth is the strange one in all of this.

Remember that the work cited was pseudepigrapha, that is, pious fiction, and the prophecy was imagined in the mouth of that enigmatic man who walked with God and then was not, for the Lord took him.

I suppose it would be like me today in these podcasts referring to something said in C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet by one of the fictional Sorns.

Jude's point, though, is that whether the writing were fiction or fact, it's true that at the return of Christ, these liars and frauds Jude has been decrying are going to be exposed in all their sinfulness.

In other words, they're not going to get away with their deceptions.