Mas alla del planeta silencioso (Out of the Silent Planet) Book

It is strange to me how often Lewis is mentioned as a leading Christian apologist, since his views on Christianity tend to be neither conventional nor well-constructed. Of course, he's not taken seriously by Biblical scholars or theologians--I suspect this is because his Jesus is a cartoon lion and his God is a space alien.

As Michael Moorcock pointed out, the prominent tone in both Tolkien and Lewis is condescension, and I admit my general impression of Lewis is that he's talking down to the audience in a sing-song voice as if we're disturbing his perusal of the morning paper. Thus I was pleasantly surprised by the opening of this book, which looked to be a more mature adventure with a more-or-less neutral narration.

It immediately reminded me of Burrough's John Carter books, an influential series of planetary adventures about a man marooned on an alien world. Of course, Lewis' take was much more plodding. Instead of jumping from action to action, nakedly slaying naked green giants with space-swords, we wander around mostly in the main character's head as he ponders things. The further along, the more ponderous it got, until our 'climax', which was an extended conversation about the myriad flaws of man.

Once again Lewis shows that the only villain he's capable of creating is one who is stupidly comical and malicious, undermining the whole conflict. It's almost as if he's so incapable of comprehending the thoughts and actions of others that he can't write believable characters unless they think and act just like him.

Actually, in this case, there are a few more layers of complexity, but they serve to undermine Lewis' overall message, so I'm not putting that in the 'win column' for the old boy. Without giving too much away, he creates a situation where all humans are helplessly screwed by the galacto-spiritual system, but then he manages to still blame them for being ignorant and desperate.

Like in his other books, the climax is both caused and fixed by an infinitely wise spirit of goodness who carefully explains everything to us and who resolves the conflict by having everyone laugh at the villain's wretchedness for a chapter and then being so powerful that it turns out there was never any conflict in the first place.

But yeah, the climax was extremely lame with Lewis just building up Straw Men and then knocking them down, one after the other, all the while ignoring the fact that the villain is the logical result of the supposedly beneficent system.

There's also the odd issue of the alien languages as presented in the book. They're all fairly straightforward, with verbs, suffixes, prefixes, compound words, and so at first I assumed we were just supposed to take them for granted, which I have no problem with. Tell me a guy has a laser sword, and I'm with you. It gets more tedious when the author keeps going on about the laser sword, trying to explain it and make it seem important.

The linguistic structure we were given was not complex enough to be interesting or thought-provoking, the plot didn't hinge on it, it didn't introduce any complexities into the philosophy of the story--yet Lewis kept returning to it over and over. Sure, he made the protagonist a linguist, but then he never took the opportunity to analyze the differences in thought and expression that a linguist would come across when learning a language (except for the occasional eye-rolling 'they have no word for hate' tidbit). There was nothing vital or interesting in it, but that didn't stop Lewis from devoting endless paragraphs to the subject.

Then again, I suppose that aimless precision is Lewis' general mode. He goes on about theology despite the fact that he doesn't have much to say. He has long scenes where he makes fun of his villains and presents them as idiots despite the fact that it renders the whole plot conflict pointless. He endlessly paints his fellow humans as stupid and worthless, as if his faith had made him so blind that he is incapable of feeling sympathy for anyone with a different point-of-view. Who knew that Christian sentiment could be turned so readily into misanthropy?

Also, his depiction of technology and sci fi elements was fairly silly. I don't even mean that it didn't age well, because it compares poorly even to depictions of earlier writers like Verne--then again, Verne somehow predicted weightlessness in space.

I was hoping I'd like this more, but then I've never really enjoyed anything by Lewis. When it first began, I had a fleeting hope that he might have written a four-star book, but by the time we got to the space angels and the exceedingly lengthy lecture about how terribly humans are, it was over.