Summary

The books in the trilogy are:

• Out of the Silent Planet (1938), set mostly on Mars (Malacandra). In this book, Dr. Elwin Ransom is kidnapped and transported to Mars. While there, he meets the planet's various inhabitants and discovers that Earth is exiled from the rest of the Solar System.
• Perelandra (1943). Also known as Voyage to Venus. Here, Dr. Ransom journeys to an unspoiled Venus (Perelandra), where he participates in a good vs. evil battle.
• That Hideous Strength (1945), set on Earth. A scientific think tank called the N.I.C.E. (The National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments) is secretly in touch with demonic entities who plan to assume control of the Earth.

In 1958, the publishing house Avon published an abridged edition of That Hideous Strength entitled The Tortured Planet.^[1]

Publication history

• Lewis, C.S. Out of the Silent Planet. London : The Bodley Head, 1938.
• Lewis, C.S. Perelandra: A Novel. London : The Bodley Head, 1943.
• Lewis, C.S. That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups. London : The Bodley Head, 1945.

The Dark Tower

An unfinished manuscript, published posthumously in 1977 and named The Dark Tower by Walter Hooper, its editor,^[7] features Elwin Ransom in a less central role as involved with an experiment that allows its participants to view on a special screen their own location in a parallel universe. Its authenticity was impeached by Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog in her criticism of Walter Hooper, but in 2003 Alastair Fowler established its authenticity when he wrote in the Yale Review that he saw Lewis writing the manuscript that would be subsequently published as The Dark Tower, heard him reading it and discussed it with him; he further stated that he gained the impression that the piece was an abandoned first attempt to write a sequel to Out of the Silent Planet.^[8]

Cosmology

The Solar System ("Field of Arbol") with Old Solar names used in the trilogy

Ransom gets much information on cosmology from the Oyarsa (presiding angel) of Malacandra, or Mars. Maleldil, the son of the Old One, ruled the Field of Arbol (the Solar System). But then the Bent One (the Oyarsa of Earth, or Satan) rebelled against Maleldil and all the eldila (much as Morgoth rebelled against Eru and the other Valar in Tolkien's Silmarillion) of Deep Heaven (outer space). The Bent One was frustrated by Maleldil decreeing that, once humans have been created, the Oyarsa of Earth would have to cede control of the planet to them - a concession not demanded of his colleague of Mars/Malacandra, who was left to rule over the planet's intelligent beings. The Bent One first tried to seduce the Martians, who then had the technology to build spaceships, to colonize Earth and live there as his subjects. This plan - directly contradicting Maleldil's plans for Earth - was foiled by the other Oyéresu. Thereupon, the Bent One attacked Mars and inflicted vast damage there, causing the complete extinction of its winged creatures (who might have been an additional intelligent species, birds, or both - the reference is not clear). Only with enormous effort was life on Mars preserved.

This is, in effect, Lewis' version of the events known in Christian theology as The War in Heaven: "Then war broke out in heaven. Michael and his angels fought against the dragon, and the dragon and his angels fought back. But he was not strong enough, and they lost their place in heaven. The great dragon was hurled down—that ancient serpent called the devil, or Satan, who leads the whole world astray. He was hurled to the earth, and his angels with him" [Revelation 12:7–10 (NIV)].

In response to his destructive acts, the Bent One suffered confinement on Earth, where he inflicted great evil. He made Earth a silent planet, cut off from the Oyéresu of other planets; thus, Earth is referred to by the name 'Thulcandra', the Silent Planet. The Bent One, or Satan, seduced Adam and Eve and caused the Original Sin in order to make humans unworthy of getting custody of the planet, as Maleldil intended. He then continues to tempt humans into evil, so as to continue their unworthiness. However, he hates the humans, whose advent was forced upon him by Maleldil, and he mistreats and tortures also the humans who submitted to him - as seen in his treatment of Professor Weston in "Perelandra" and of the N.I.C.E. directors in the end of "That Hideous Strength". Maleldil incarnated as a man on Thulcandra to save the human race. According to the Green Lady, Tinidril (Mother of Perelandra, or Venus), Thulcandra is favored among all the worlds because Maleldil came to it to become a man.

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 Oyéresu put an end to the rule of the Bent Eldil and, on the way, smash the Moon to fragments.

In the Field of Arbol, the outer planets are older than the inner planets. Asteroids are called "dancers before the threshold of the Great Worlds."

Eldila

The eldila (singular eldil) are super-human spirits. The human characters in the trilogy encounter them on various planets, but the eldila themselves are native to interplanetary and interstellar space ("Deep Heaven"). They can, if they want, remain fixed to one point on a planet's surface - but that requires a conscious act on their part, without which they would instantly drift away into space.

Certain very powerful eldila, the Oyéresu (singular Oyarsa), control the course of nature on each of the planets of the Solar System. They can manifest in corporeal forms. The title Oyarsa seems to indicate the function of leadership, regardless of the leader's species; when the Perelandran human Tor assumes rule of his world, he styles himself "Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri" (presumably "Tor, Ruler of Perelandra").

The eldila are science-fictionalised depictions of angels, immortal and holy. (As Lewis implies in Chapter 22 of Out of the Silent Planet, the name Oyarsa was suggested by Oyarses, the name given in Bernard Silvestris's Cosmographia to the governors of the celestial spheres. Bernard's word was almost certainly a corruption—or a deliberate alteration—of Greek οὐσιάρχης [ousiarches, "lords of being"], used with the same meaning in the Hermetic Asclepius.) The eldila resident on Earth are "dark eldila"; in other words, fallen angels or demons. The Oyarsa of Earth, the "Bent One", is Satan. During the trilogy, Ransom 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. The Oyéresu of other worlds have characteristics like those of the corresponding classical gods; for instance, the Oyarsa of Jupiter gives a feeling of merriment (joviality). It is made clear that they are identical with the gods and goddesses of the Greco-Roman pantheon, but that the Greeks and Romans were wrong to worship them as gods—in fact, they are angels, faithful servants of the one and only true God, Maleldil. As noted by Lewis in the non-fiction book The Discarded Image, the identification of the Greco-Roman gods as angels can be traced to late medieval and Renaissance times, when European intellectuals rediscovered and highly valued works of classical antiquity where references to these gods abound, and this needed to be reconciled with these intellectuals' Christian faith.

Hnau

Hnau is a word in the Old Solar language which refers to "rational animals" such as humans. In the book, the Old Solar speaker specifies that God is not hnau, and is unsure whether eldila can be termed "hnau", deciding that if they are hnau, they are a different kind of hnau than humans or Martians.

The term was adopted by some others, including Lewis's friend J. R. R. Tolkien; Tolkien used the term in The Notion Club Papers, which were not published in his lifetime. Tolkien distinguished hnau from beings of pure spirit or spirits able to assume a body (which is not essential to their nature). Similarly, a character in James Blish's science fiction novel A Case of Conscience wonders whether a particular alien is a hnau, which he defines as having "a rational soul".

The term has been used by philosopher Thomas I. White in "Is a Dolphin a Person?" White asks if dolphins are persons, and if they are, whether they can also be reckoned as hnau.

Old Solar language

According to the Space Trilogy's cosmology, the language of all the inhabitants of the Field of Arbol is Old Solar, or Hlab-Eribol-ef-Cordi. Only Earth lost the language; this loss was due to the Bent One's influence. Old Solar can be likened to the Elvish languages invented by Lewis's friend, Tolkien. The grammar is little known, except for the plurals of nouns. The plurals of some words (hross, eldil) are simple, only adding a final -a or -i; others (as for Oyarsa, sorn, hnakra), are quite complex broken plurals, adding an internal -é-, and adding or altering a final vowel (usually to -i or -u), and may also include internal metathesis (Oyéresu, séroni, hnéraki). Old Solar is also referred to as "the Great Tongue":

For this was the language spoken before the Fall and beyond the Moon and the meanings were not given to the syllables by chance, or skill, or long tradition, but truly inherent in them as the shape of the great Sun is inherent in the little waterdrop. This was Language herself, as she first sprang at Maleldil's bidding out of the molten quicksilver of the first star called Mercury on Earth, but Viritrilbia in Deep Heaven.^[9]