The Space Trilogy
[1] Lewis stated in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green:[2] What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men … and an essay in J.B.S.
I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) p[oin]t of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side.
"[4] The books are not especially concerned with technological speculation, and in many ways read like fantasy adventures combined with themes of biblical history and classical mythology.
[5][6] 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.
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).
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.
The siege starts to end (with the Oyéresu of other worlds descending to Earth) at the finale of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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".
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]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.
The Space Trilogy also plays on themes in 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.
Links between Lewis's Space Trilogy and his other writings are discussed at great length in Michael Ward's Planet Narnia and in Kathryn Lindskoog's C.S.
