Both stories portray a fanatical physicist who builds a spaceship in his backyard, accompanied by a greedy businessman. But when Wells evolved from a science fiction writer to an amateur philosopher, Lewis lamented that Wells had “sold his birthright for a pot of message.” One can’t help but notice all the similarities in plot between Out of the Silent Planet and Wells’ The First Men in the Moon. As a boy, Lewis had enjoyed stories by Wells (1866-1946), especially such classics as War of the Worlds and The Time Machine.

Wells novel in its plot, but it couldn’t be more anti-Wellsian in its themes. Ironically, these two literary outsiders continue to exert a tremendous influence on our culture while the “mainstream” novelists they disliked are not widely read outside of academic circles. But they lived at the height of literary Modernism, an era when “difficult” writing was prized over accessible writing, when it was thought that literature should reflect the angst of contemporary times and be full of stylistic novelties. Lewis and Tolkien were finding too little of what they liked in stories because they preferred the traditional stories of their childhood and youth-myth, legend, epic, fantasy, and fairy tales. Tolkien’s effort, “The Lost Road,” was never finished, but Lewis’s half of the bargain resulted in Out of the Silent Planet, the first book of the Ransom trilogy. I am afraid we shall have to write some ourselves.” The two went on to agree that Lewis would try his hand at a space-travel tale and Tolkien would do something with time-travel. As Tolkien explained it, Lewis said to him one day, “Tollers, there is too little of what we really like in stories. Out of the Silent Planet sprung from a conversation between C. They would have been even more alarmed if they had noticed that he was writing what he called “theologized science fiction,” a fast-paced adventure story with profound spiritual overtones. Lewis scandalized his fellow Oxford dons in 1938 when he published a fantasy novel, Out of the Silent Planet. Having already earned a reputation as a formidable literary scholar, C.

Cosmic trilogy cs lewis