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The Space Trilogy, Cosmic Trilogy or Ransom Trilogy is a trilogy of three science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis.

The books in the trilogy are:

A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.

Influences and approach

Lewis stated:

What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds both of which seemed to take the idea of such * travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook which I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own point of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read...." (From a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green).

The other main literary influence was David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920).*

The books are not especially concerned with scientific accuracy or technological speculation, and in many ways they read like fantasy adventures. Like most of Lewis's mature writing, they have a thoroughly Christian outlook and much discussion of contemporary rights and wrongs. Madeleine L'Engle's kairos series is quite similar in its outlook.

Ransom

Ransom appears very similar to Lewis himself: a university professor, expert in languages and medieval literature, unmarried (Lewis did not marry until his fifties), wounded in World War I and with no living relatives except for one sibling. Lewis, however, apparently intended for Ransom to be partially patterned after his friend and fellow Oxford professor J.R.R. Tolkien, since Lewis is presented as novelizing Ransom's reminiscences in the epilogue of Out of the Silent Planet and is a character-narrator in the frame tale for Perelandra.

In "Out of the Silent Planet" it is suggested that "Ransom" is not the character's real name but merely an alias for a respectable professor whose reputation might suffer from his telling a fantastic story of having been to the planet Mars.

In the following books, however, this is unaccountably dropped and it is made clear that Ransom is the character's true name. As befits a philologist, he provides an etymology: the name does not derive from the word "ransom" but rather is a contraction of the Old English for "Ranulf's Son". This may be another allusion to Tolkien, a professor of Old English.

Cosmology

Ransom gets much information on cosmology from the Oyarsa (presiding angel) of Malacandra. Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol directly. But then the Bent One (the Oyarsa of Earth) rebelled against Maleldil and all the eldila of Deep Heaven. In response to this act, the Bent One suffered confinement on Earth where he first inflicted great evil. Thus he made Earth a silent planet, cut off from the Oyéresu of other planets, whence the name 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet. Maleldil tried to reach out to Thulcandra and became a man to save the human race. According to the Green Lady, Tinidril (Mother of Perelandra, or Venus), Thulcandra is favored among all the worlds.

In the Field of Arbol, the outer planets are older, while the inner planets are newer.

Earth will remain a silent planet until the end of the great Siege of Deep Heaven against the Oyarsa of Earth. The siege starts to end (with the Oyéresu of other worlds descending to Earth) at the finale of the Trilogy, That Hideous Strength. But there is still much to happen until the fulfillment of what is predicted in the Book of Revelation when the Oyéresu put an end to the rule of Satan (the Bent Eldil) and on the way smash the Moon to fragments. This, in turn, would not be "The End of the World" but merely "The Very Beginning" of what is still to come.

Eldila

The eldila (singular eldil) are a species of intelligent extraterrestrial. The human characters in the trilogy encounter them on various planets, but the eldila themselves are native to interplanetary and interstellar space ("Deep Heaven"). In standard science-fiction terms, they are "multi-dimensional energy beings." They are barely visible as faint, shifting light.

Certain very powerful eldila, the Oyéresu (singular Oyarsa), control the course of nature on each of the planets of the Solar System. They (and maybe all the eldila) can manifest in forms other than faint light.

The eldila are science-fictionalized depictions of angels, immortal and holy, with the Oyéresu perhaps being angels of a higher order (possibly in the traditional Hierarchy of angels). The eldila resident on (actually, imprisoned in) Earth are "dark eldila", fallen angels or demons. The Oyarsa of Earth is Satan. Ransom later meets the Oyéresu of both Mars and Venus, who are described as being masculine (but not actually male) and feminine (but not actually female), respectively.

Parallels with other works

The cosmology of all three books—in which the Oyéresu of Mars and Venus somewhat resemble the corresponding gods from classical mythology—derives from Lewis's interest in medieval beliefs. Central concerns of his book The Discarded Image are the way medieval authors borrowed concepts from pre-Christian religion and science and attempted to reconcile them with Christianity, and the lack of a clear distinction between natural and supernatural phenomena (or between what are now called science fiction and fantasy) in medieval thought. The Space Trilogy also expands on Lewis's essay "Religion and Rocketry", which argues that as long as humanity remains flawed and sinful, our exploration of other planets will tend to do them more harm than good.

Another novel written partly at the same time, Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, has several possible parallels with the Space Trilogy. Both Perelandra and The Return of the King include a decisive final struggle in a subterranean chamber, with the adversary falling into volcanic fire, and the attitude of the scientists in That Hideous Strength toward the natural world is similar to that of Tolkien's character Saruman.

Glossopoiea/Language

According to the Space Trilogy's cosmology, the speech of all the inhabitants of the Field of Arbol is the Old Solar or Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi. Only Earth lost the language due to the Bent One's influence. Old Solar can be likened to the Elvish languages invented by Lewis's friend, Tolkien.

Glossary

Some terminology in the "Old Solar" language is used throughout the trilogy. (Words used in only one volume of the trilogy are defined in the article about that volume.)
  • Field of Arbol — the Solar System
  • handra — a planet or land
  • Malacandra — Mars
  • Perelandra — Venus
  • Thulcandra — Earth, literally "The Silent Planet"
  • Glund or Glundandra — Jupiter
  • Viritrilbia — Mercury
  • Lurga — Saturn
  • Sulva — The Moon
  • hnau or 'nau — a rational being, capable of speech, intellect, and personhood, and containing a soul.

Some of this terminology can be linked up with Christian concepts:

  • The Old One — God the Father
  • Maleldil the Younger — God the Son, or specifically Jesus (sometimes from the point of view of extraterrestrials who haven't heard that he was incarnated as a human being)
  • The Third One — God the Holy Ghost
  • Eldil, pl. Eldila — an Angel
  • Oyarsa, pl. Oyéresu — (Title) Ruler of a planet, a higher-order angel, perhaps an arch-angel.

The Dark Tower

An unfinished manuscript, The Dark Tower — featuring Ransom and time travel — was published posthumously in 1977. (Some doubt the authenticity of the manuscript; see The Dark Tower entry.)

External links

Christian fiction and allegory | Science fiction book series | Trilogies

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Space Trilogy".

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