The Crusty Curmudgeon

Perelandra: Chapter 12

2026-08-02T09:00:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. If you don't want me ruining the experience for you, put this post down and go read Perelandra now. I promise I won't be offended.

Elwin Ransom, Cambridge philologist, has been brought to the planet Perelandra (Venus) by Maleldil, the supreme spiritual ruler of the solar system. Here, he met the Venusian "Eve," a green lady, and his enemy, the physicist Weston. Weston became possessed by a demonic entity, and although his own personality apparently ceased to be, the entity inhabiting his body persistently tried to tempt the Green Lady to break Maleldil's one law, which forbade dwelling on Perelandra's lone fixed island.

Ransom soon determined that his own reason for being on Perelandra was to cofront the Un-Man, the thing inside Weston, and prevent Perelandra's Fall. However, he had neither the persuasive power nor the sheer persistence of the Un-Man, who did not require sleep. Maleldil revealed to him that his only recourse is to kill Weston's body. It was no accident that he was called Ransom: he was the one responsible to stop sin from entering Perelandra.

When Ransom awakens, after bathing and eating, he searches for the Un-Man. He finds him in the act of maiming a bird, and starts the fight by punching Weston's body in the jaw. Though they are evenly matched, man to man, their fighting styles are different: Ransom is a superior boxer, while the Un-Man claws and tears. In his mind, the fight's outcome boils down to whether he could pummel Weston's body to death before losing too much blood.

As the fight goes on, Weston escapes to the sea, riding away on one of the large fish. Ransom does likewise. Fortunately, the creatures follow one another, so despite the Un-Man's head start, he hasn't lost him. Given a reprieve from the violence, he takes stock of himself and realizes he's in worse shape than he thought.

Unlike the previous two chapters, chapter 12 is long on action and short on dialogue, so I think I'll have a bit less to say this week. Two men trying to bludgeon each other to death don't lend themselves to too much in-depth analysis. Ernest Hemingway could pull it off, but I'm not him.

There are some clever details in this story. Lewis accurately notes that punching someone in the jaw, without boxing gloves, hurts.¹ Ransom also assumes that Weston, possessed by a devil, would have superhuman strength, but it turns out the demon within him has no more physical might than the overweight, middle-aged Weston had. Ransom realizes that he can actually win this. Ransom's boxing is a more tactical and intellectual approach to combat, but the Un-Man's style of fighting is brutal and feral, tearing at Ransom with his claws. Weston no longer possesses a human soul, and accordingly his fighting style is bestial, consistent with the howling and the other animalistic behaviour he's displayed since his possession.

Not only the Green Lady, but all the animals on the floating islands have been put into a supernatural sleep. Presumably this is so they won't have to witness the bloody conflict between Ransom and the Un-Man. When they escape to the ocean, however, the large fish and seabirds are still awake. It makes sense if they can't see the bloodshed. When Ransom first confronts the possessed Weston in this chapter, he catches him in the act of torturing a bird. Weston has demonstrated this cruelty before against the harmless fauna of Perelandra. But this time, he could have just picked the bird up while it was sleeping: it was not only harmless, but helpless.

After so many days (weeks? months?) on Perelandra, Ransom realizes he's actually become pretty physically fit, and that he's got nothin to be ashamed of in his own middle-aged body. In the opening paragraph, he quotes Psalm 17:15: "When I wake up after Thy image, I shall be satisfied." The allusion is, perhaps, intended as humour. But Psalm 15 is apropos to the present situation, as it is a prayer of David to be delivered from wicked people and vindicated in the face of his enemies. Ransom realizes he may not leave Perelandra undamaged, or even alive, but middle-aged body or not, he will not be ashamed to meet his Maker in the end.

The Un-Man can quote the Psalms, too: "Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthanai." This is the first line of Psalm 22 in Aramaic, as spoken by Jesus Christ on the cross. The Un-Man mocks Christ, and he mocks Ransom for thinking he can beat him: Maleldil did not come to save his Son from crucifixion; he did not deliver the martyrs from their sufferings. But he thinks that the Cross was a victory for his side, and he is mistaken.

In the thick of the fight, Ransom finds himself quoting literature as a battle cry: "Once he was actually astride the enemy’s chest, squeezing its throat with both hands and—he found to his surprise—shouting a line out of The Battle of Maldon. This is an Old English poem celebrating the real Battle of Maldon in AD 991, in which the Anglo-Saxons failed to stop a Viking invasion. Only 325 lines of the poem survived to the modern era, and its only extant manuscript was destroyed in a fire in 1731. Near the end of the surviving portion, an aged warrior, Byrhtwold, rallies the troops with this cry:

Hige sceal þe heardra, heorte þe cenre,
mod sceal þe mare, þe ure mægen lytlað.²

which is, being interpreted, "Resolution must be the tougher, hearts the keener, courage must be the more as our strength grows less."³ It's a fitting battle cry for Ransom, whose own strength is limited, but he is standing his ground.

It seems that in real life, too, Lewis's mind was drawn to literature during times of danger or crisis: as he writes in Surprised by Joy about his experience in the trenches during World War I:

It was the first bullet I heard—so far from me that it "whined" like a journalist's or a peace-time poet's bullet. At that moment there was something not exactly like fear, much less like indifference: a little quavering signal that said, "This is War. This is what Homer wrote about."⁴

There's another literary allusion Ransom uses as a battle cry in this chapter, as Ransom pursues the Weston-thing across the ocean on the giant fish: "My hounds are bred out of the Spartan kind, so flew’d so sanded." This is a line from A Midsummer Night's Dream.⁵ In the play, Theseus's speech signals the end of the chaos in the forest and the return of order. On Perelandra, Maleldil is restoring order through Ransom's pursuit of Weston. Ransom has become Theseus, the school of fish are his hounds, and the Un-Man his fleeing prey.

The Enemy is fleeing, but not yet defeated.

Footnotes

1. Though, as Malcolm Reynolds might tell you, it is, on occasion, hilarious.

2. The Battle of Maldon, The Labyrinth: Medieval Studies Web site, Georgetown University, archived December 15, 2013 at https://web.archive.org/web/20131215114421/http://www8.georgetown.edu/departments/medieval/labyrinth/library/oe/texts/a9.html, lines 312–13.

3. The Battle of Maldon, Anglo-Saxon Poetry, ed. S. A. J. Bradley (London: Everyman, 1995), 527. I'd like to have included my own translation—I loved studying Old English in university—but my Anglo-Saxon is rusty and my copy of Sweet isn't close at hand.

4. C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Distributed Proofreaders Canada, updated December 21, 2025, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150220/html.php.

5. William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Folger Shakespeare Library, accessed August 1, 2026, act 4, scene 1, lines 123–24, https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/a-midsummer-nights-dream/read/.

Perelandra: Chapter 11

2026-07-26T09:00:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. You may well have a lot of reading ahead of you.

Ransom, brought by the Oyarsa of Malacandra to the planet Perelandra, encountered his enemy, the physicist Weston, there. Only Weston was no longer himself, having become possessed by the "Force" he reveres—really Satan or one of his fallen angels—and become what Ransom termed the "Un-Man." Weston was there to tempt and corrupt the Green Lady, the unfallen Eve of Perelandra. He did this by relentlessly trying to appeal to her sense of vanity and to persuade her that the one law on Perelandra, against dwelling on its fixed island, was made to be broken. Ransom attempted to dissuade her from heeding Weston. Fortunately, the Lady seemed resistant to the Un-Man's persuasive skills.

After days of this, Ransom sits against a tree and questions divine justice. He has made no headway against the Un-Man. If the Enemy was there in person, where is the representative of Maleldil to counter him? The answer that comes back to him in the dark is that, of course, he is Maleldil's man: an idea that he almost dismisses as blasphemy. But he realizes that Maleldil has been with him all along. His own arrival on Perelandra was as miraculous as Weston's. The fate of Perelandra is left in God's hands—and he and the Green Lady are those hands.

With a sense of horror, he understands what Maleldil actually intends him to do. He must defeat the Un-Man physically, not merely spiritually. Even if the evil thing inhabiting Weston's body could not be destroyed, Weston's body could be, and that would end its influence.

The Voice that has been influencing Ransom's thoughts then tells him: "It is not for nothing that you are named Ransom." He recognizes the significance of his name: he is responsible to resist the evil. If he failed, there would be another ransom for Perelandra—as appalling as that would be. He has resolved himself that he will try to kill the Un-Man the next day. The Voice tells him that he has cast the Enemy into sleep, and instructs him to sleep also.

This chapter is essentially a three-way dialogue between Ransom, that internal critic he calls his "voluble self," and the voice of Maleldil himself. I couldn't help picturing Ransom debating his next move with his shoulder angel and shoulder devil: the voluble self being the Bad Angel on the left shoulder, and Maleldil the Good Angel on his right. (We see this trope all the time in modern cartoons, but it's much older than that: the deuterocanonical Shepherd of Hermas speaks of two angels, representing righteousness and iniquity, attempting to guide a person's heart. And in the 16th century, Christopher Marlowe had a Good Angel and Bad Angel try to influence the titular character in Doctor Faustus.)

Lewis had a strong belief in the sovereignty of God. Hence Ransom realizes he has no idea what he could do, except do what he is able to oppose the Enemy: as he puts it, "as long as he did his best…God would see to the final issue." Lewis thought the Calvinistic system of theology too harsh, and he had too strong a belief in libertarian free will to be a Calvinist himself. Nonetheless, he aligned with Calvinist belief on the sovereignty of God: God's plans do not fail because of the weakness of his people; we simply do what God requires of us, in our weakness, and trust the outcome to him.

Ransom's thoughts go on: "If Ransom refused, the plan, so far, miscarried." Even if he does his best, if he fails, then the outcome is that Perelandra falls.

I first read the Space Trilogy in 1992, and it made such an impression on me then that I started using "Ransom"¹ as my online handle, and I still do. Reading Out of the Silent Planet, I had assumed a theological meaning to the name. However, once we get to Perelandra, we understand that the "ransom" is not the money paid to redeem a slave or a captive. That is the second ransom that he seeks to avoid. Rather, he is the one who must pay the cost of opposing the evil. In a sense, he is the price: he will fight, bleed, and suffer on Maleldil's behalf to remove the evil presence. Perelandra's innocence is to be purchased by Ransom's blood, sweat, and tears. And he must succeed.

As we'd expect from a Cambridge philology professor, Ransom correctly knows that his surname is derived from Ranolf's son. Ranolf or Ranulf was a male name introduced to England by the Norman conquest. Ranolf itself means something like "wise wolf" or perhaps "shield wolf," which itself adds another layer of symbolism to Lewis's choice of names.²

Ransom's internal struggle with killing Weston reminds me, somewhat, of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He started out as a Christian pacifist, vocally opposing Nazism and refusing to swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler. In time he came to realize that Hitler's regime was structurally criminal and it was not enough merely to oppose Nazification: the regime itself had to be destroyed, and Hitler had to die. He joined the German military intelligence service, the Abwehr, and collaborated with the anti-Nazi conspirators it harboured.³

Bonhoeffer struggled with murder being a sin, but concluded that failing to act against such evil was the greater sin. Ransom on Perelandra begins by opposing Weston spiritually: where the Un-Man would persuade the Green Lady, Ransom would dissuade. He finds it foolish to think opposing ultimate evil could boil down to just killing Weston. "What would it prove?" Is original sin so insignificant, that stopping it can be as simplistic as bashing it on the head? What lesson would that teach? Of course, Jesus taught that "if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away" (Matthew 5:30). Cutting off your hand doesn't deal decisively with the problem of sin. But it removes the occasion for, and presence of, that sin.

"Did Maleldil suggest that our own world might have been saved if the elephant had accidentally trodden on the serpent a moment before Eve was about to yield?" A stampeding elephant is merely a force of nature, while Ransom was deliberately brought to Perelandra for this purpose, and if it is Maleldil's will that evil be removed by destroying its agent, that is no less his solution to the problem than, say, a spectacular showdown on a mountaintop against 450 false prophets. And God can even incorporate that impersonal stampeding elephant into his plans. He deposed King Ahab with a random arrow. Such "chance" events pose no problem for a believer in divine sovereignty.

Two chapters ago, the Weston-thing had tried to argue that the transgression of Earth's first parents led to the Maleldil becoming a man and redeeming humanity, which was a good thing. Ransom rebutted this by admitting that it was a good, but it was not the greater good that Maleldil had intended. There's a recapitulation of this thought when Ransom contemplates that if he will not be the ransom, then there must be another. "Not a second crucifixion: perhaps—who knows—not even a second Incarnation…some act of even more appalling love." The redemption story will not repeat itself across worlds. The Incarnation and crucifixion were Earth's; they are not Perelandra's. Ransom cannot imagine what the latter might be. The question awes and terrifies him.

And so Ransom accepts his responsibility to stand in the gap between innocence and corruption on Perelandra. We get a little of his backstory, without him going into detail: he had been tasked with doing "a very dangerous job" during World War I, and he had had to "see a certain man in London and make to him an excessively embarrassing confession which justice demanded." Ransom knows what it means to do the right thing even when the right thing is terrifying: If not me, then who?

On Malacandra, Ransom resisted Weston and Devine on behalf of Oyarsa and the Martian hnau. Here on Perelandra, he must do so again, physically interposing his body between the Un-Man and the Green Lady. And he will resist evil again, in That Hideous Strength—but that's another story. There are still six chapters left in this one.

Footnotes

¹ Or, more recently, "RansomOttawa," because there are a whole lot of Ransoms about these days.

² In Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis said "Ransom" was a pseudonym. Maybe he forgot.

³ Coincidentally, Bonhoeffer's arrest came only days before the publication of Perelandra in April 1943.

Perelandra: Chapter 10

2026-07-19T19:30:10.087-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. I recommend you support your local bookseller or public library, and read the book first.

Philologist Elwin Ransom, brought to the planet Perelandra (Venus) by Oyarsa, the spiritual ruler of Malacandra (Mars), encountered his old enemy Weston who had abducted him to Malacandra, while exploring Perelandra's sole fixed island with the Green Lady, the planet's only woman. Weston's personality is gone: Ransom believed he had become an Un-Man, an animated corpse possessed by the malevolent spirit Weston had called the Force, but which Ransom believed to be one of Satan's allies, if not Satan himself.

Ransom later found the Un-Man by following a trail of tortured animals. He was trying to tempt the Green Lady, into violating the one law decreed by Maleldil, the ruler of the universe: not to live or spend the night on the island. After Ransom dissuaded the Lady from listening to the Weston-thing, that was Weston, it engaged in psychological torture on him, calling his name for no reason to keep him awake all night.

Ransom does manage some sleep, but when he awakes, the Un-Man is at his efforts to tempt the Lady again, telling her story after story of women who had suffered nobly but were vindicated. Ransom suspects these women were "witches or perverts." The temptation goes on for days, and Ransom's efforts to stop it are hampered by his own need for sleep, which Weston no longer shares. Further, at times he loses his temper, causing him to lose ground to the Un-Man's rhetoric.

One day Ransom awakes to find Weston and the Lady dressed in robes made of feathers The Un-Man has told her that the people of Earth wear things like this, not just for protection from the cold, but to look beautiful. The Weston-thing has a pocket mirror: he shows the Lady her own reflection, but she is fearful of this new experience and seemingly indifferent to her new appearance. He also tries to make a gift of the mirror to her, but without a concept of personal property, she does not understand the gift.

Ransom realizes at the end that the Un-Man's appeal to the Lady's vanity isn't merely superficial: "The external and, as it were, dramatic conception of the self was the enemy's true aim. He was making her mind a theatre in which that phantom self should hold the stage."

In The Screwtape Letters, published in 1942, a year before Perelandra, the elder devil Screwtape commends his nephew Wormwood for making use of the Patient's sense of vanity. On one hand, the Patient has acquired some urbane and intellectual acquaintances with whom he can socialize, and who for all their sophistication do not understand the "spiritual" world he has discovered in his newfound Christianity. On the other hand, he can happily kneel in prayer next to a simple greengrocer, knowing that he and his urbane friends are out of the grocer's league. The Patient can be let to be self-satisfied for walking in both worlds and believing he's above them both.¹ Pride isn't merely one of the seven deadly sins: it's the deadly sin, which Lewis believed the cause of all human misery.²

Ransom suspects Weston's anecdotes to be about "witches and perverts," not merely about women who suffered nobly in the face of tragedy or injustice. Rather, they would appear to be about people who transgressed social norms—of which "witches and perverts" would be two examples.

Lewis was a traditional conservative but eschewed partisan politics, and in a series in his honour, I would do the same. However, I'm reminded of the 2017 incident in the U.S. Senate in which Elizabeth Warren was deemed to have broken a Senate standing rule and barred by a vote from participating further in the debate. The majority Senate leader, Mitch McConnell, explained later: "She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted." Those last three words subsequently became a feminist slogan celebrating women who refused to be silenced. But if we can take what apparently happened in the Senate at face value, then the fact got lost that Warren persisted in transgressing the norms of Congressional conduct.

Lewis might have found it admirable that some women persisted against oppression or injustice. I doubt whether he would have approved of Weston extolling the Nietzschean idea of the superman who rises above conventional societal norms.

The logic of the Un-Man's temptation is something like this: Maleldil loves the Green Lady and wants her to become older, to mature. Part of this maturation process, as he said in the previous chapter, was to understand that Maleldil's rule was made to be broken. Because she is beloved, she is special. He shows her the mirror so that she can see and admire herself; he offers her the mirror so she can have something others cannot. And because she is special and beautiful and worthy of self-admiration, she deserves the right to transgress Maleldil's rule against dwelling on the Fixed Land. (She will be like God, knowing good and evil.)

After the serpent tempted Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge, Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves to mask their shame (Genesis 3:7). Later, God gave them animal skins instead (v. 21). Clothing was the first visible sign of the Fall: the leaves that cloaked their newfound shame, then the skins that symbolized the need for sacrifice to atone for their sins. Though unfallen, the Green Lady has bypassed the fig leaves and gone directly to the animal skins. While she says Weston found the feathers that the birds had dropped, in the last chapter, Weston was torturing frogs for pleasure. I wonder whether he told the Lady the truth. We can at least infer that she is not aware of him killing the birds.

The temptation continues next Sunday with chapter 11.

Footnotes

¹ C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, chapter 10, fadedpage.com, accessed July 19, 2026, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20140509/html.php.

² "It is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began." Lewis, Mere Christianity, chapter 8, fadedpage.com, accessed July 19, 2026, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150620/html.php.

Perelandra: Chapter 9

2026-07-12T09:00:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. I recommend reading the book first. It's short, I promise.

Ransom and the Green Lady of Perelandra were exploring the Fixed Land, the one solid island on the planet, when they encountered Weston, who had abducted Ransom to Mars in Out of the Silent Planet. Weston tried to persuade Ransom of his newfound belief in emergent evolution, directed by an impersonal, spiritual "Force." In doing so, he allowed himself to become possessed by this Force.

Ransom followed Weston off the Fixed Land back to the mats of floating vegetation that comprise most of the "land" on Venus. There, in the dark, he overheard Weston trying to persuade the Green Lady that the ban on staying on the Fixed Land, imposed by Maleldil, was not as severe as she assumed. It was permissible for her to imagine living there, as it would make her wiser.

When Ransom awakens, he walks along the "shore" of his island, where he encounters one of Perelandra's native animals. However, something or someone has torn the colourful frog-like thing apart. With difficulty, Ransom puts the still-living animal out of its misery. He then continues his walk, following a trail of mutilated frogs, until he comes across Weston in the act of gutting one before he escapes again.

Ransom realizes that Weston has been taken over by something thoroughly evil. He resolves that he must prevent him from talking again to the Lady, at least without himself also present. When he finds the two of them conversing, Weston (or, rather, the thing now inhabiting his body) is still trying to persuade the woman that imagining herself disobeying Maleldil's command is actually a good. This time, however, Ransom is there to rebut him and tell the Lady not to listen. Unable to persuade the Lady, Weston lets out a terrifying, feral howl, while the Lady falls instantly asleep. However, Weston prevents Ransom from sleeping, by repeatedly calling out his name and answering "Nothing" when Ransom asks what he wants.

Ransom no longer thinks of Weston as Weston; he is henceforth referred to as "it," "Weston's body," or something similar. Evidently the personality of Weston no longer exists: he has been undone by the thing he called into himself in chapter 7, and which now animates his body. Lewis calls Weston the "Un-Man" for the first time in this chapter. Whatever this Force is, Ransom recognizes it as absolute evil. When Ransom encounters Weston gutting the frogs, he is doing so surgically and clinically, with a smile on his face suggesting pleasure, as though the evil he is committing is perfectly normal and rational. The thing possessing the body of Weston claims to have been with Maleldil in Deep Heaven. Ransom believes this being was the one who, in another form, tempted Eve. However, he doesn't concern himself with whether the thing in Weston is Satan himself or one of his minions: as he says later in the book, "I know what you are. Which of them doesn't matter."

Of course no one on the fallen Earth is a stranger to death and suffering—and Perelandra was published in the midst of World War II, probably the greatest period of human death and suffering in living memory. On Malacandra, Weston and Devine killed three intelligent Martians. Malacandra was damaged by the fall of Earth, though its own fall was not total, so the hnau reacted to the deaths of their comrades with grief and pity rather than anger, disciplining and expelling the humans instead of waging war against them. However, the trail of gutted frogs on Perelandra is the first time Ransom has witnessed death here. It is not yet clear whether the Green Lady saw Weston killing the animals. Part of his purpose for being there, he says, is to teach her about Death.

Ransom was a veteran of the Somme. I assume by this Lewis means he was at the Battle of the Somme in 1916, the bloodiest and costliest battle of World War I. Lewis had been a second lieutenant in the 1st Battalion of the Somerset Light Infantry, and in 1918, he too spent time at the front in the trenches of the Somme. He was wounded by friendly fire, and two of his comrades killed, during the German Spring Offensive a few months later. Ransom, like Lewis, had experienced the horrors of war firsthand. Yet on this world that does not yet know death, he finds the casual deaths of some simple animals more horrifying still.

The thing that was Weston continues to tempt the Green Lady in the same way as before, trying to persuade her that making stories about living on the Fixed Land is permissible by Maleldil's laws. He also twists Maleldil's ban into permission, telling her that he had made the rule only so that, when the Lady became wise enough, she would know it could be broken. Thus disobedience becomes a kind of obedience. Since the reason for the command was not given and it does not appear to be for her good, that must be the only explanation for it. "He longs—" says the Weston-thing, "oh, how greatly He longs—to see his creature become fully itself." ("Your eyes will be opened, and you will be as God" [Gen. 3:5].)

Fortunately, with Ransom present, he is able to reason the Green Lady out of uncritically accepting the Weston-thing's words. After all, he says, there are different kinds of obedience: there is the kind where you obey because you recognize the good of the rule, and another kind where obedience out of love is a joy in itself. The Fixed Land rule is the latter—as was, of course, God's instructions to Adam and Eve not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The Lady is innocent, but not unwise to the Un-Man's schemes.

The Weston-thing's final assertion is that the transgression of Adam and Eve on our world was the thing that caused Maleldil to become a man and enter our world. "Why not do evil that good may come?" (Romans 3:8). Ransom responds to this that of course Maleldil can make good come of anything, but it wasn't the good they would have had if they had not disobeyed, and good did not come for everyone. Indeed, when Ransom asks if the thing in Weston rejoiced at Maleldil's coming, he gives out that unearthly howl.

It appears that the fight for the innocence of Perelandra is to be a battle of wits between Ransom and the satanic thing that was once Weston. And there's plenty of book left to go.

Perelandra: Chapter 8

2026-07-05T09:00:00.000-04:00

Ransom and the Green Lady were exploring the Fixed Land, Perelandra's only solid landmass, when they observed a spherical object fall into the sea. On the beach, Ransom was surprised to find his nemesis Weston, who had abducted him to Mars (in Out of the Silent Planet); likewise, Weston was surprised to see Ransom. Maleldil, the spiritual ruler of the Solar System, has forbidden the Green Lady and her male counterpart, the King, from spending the night on the Fixed Land. Therefore, Weston allowed her to leave, but he kept Ransom on the beach at gunpoint.

Weston told Ransom that his philosophy had changed since they were on Mars. There, he had been a materialist and a colonialist, believing that it was humanity's destiny to expand to the stars. Anything that stood in their way, including the rational inhabitants of Mars, was expendable. Since then, his beliefs had evolved to embrace emergent evolution directed by an impersonal, amoral spiritual essence he called the Force. In spite of Ransom's warning that all spirits are not good, Weston called this Force into himself, apparently allowing himself to be taken over by it, before lapsing into a coma. Left alone on the Fixed Land, Ransom slept on the beach.

When Ransom awakes, he finds Weston and his boat have gone. It seems he has left the Fixed Land. Ransom searches for some food. When he returns to the beach, he finds a giant fish of the kind that he and the Green Lady had ridden to the island. It appears to be waiting for him, and it carries him back to Perelandra's floating islands. By now it is night. His slumber is awakened by the sound of Weston and the Green Lady conversing.

Weston is debating with the Lady about Maleldil's law forbidding her or the King from dwelling on the Fixed Land. Weston finds this law strange, arguing that Maleldil has not forbidden her to think about living there. Maleldil would want her to know not only what really is, but what might be: just as the people of Earth tell stories to amuse one another, Maleldil has made no law forbidding her from imagining what it would be like to live on the Fixed Land. Perhaps, he says, he and "Piebald" (Ransom, so called by the Lady because of the uneven sunburn he got on the trip to Perelandra) were brought to Perelandra to make the Lady "older" (wiser) while she was separated from the King. They are here to teach her what Maleldil has not. In fact, Maleldil is allowing her to learn from others to make her wiser. She regards the King as always wiser than herself, but Weston suggests that when they are reunited, she will now be the older one.

Then Weston goes to sleep. Ransom reflects that he's different somehow; in his talk with the Green Lady, he sounds neither pompous nor bullying as he usually is. He sounds very unlike himself—to the point that Ransom is sure that it is Weston, but also not Weston, who is speaking.

So by now it's pretty obvious what Lewis is setting up. Perelandra is pristine planet, inhabited by one man and woman who go around naked and enjoy regular communion with their god. Then a malevolent influence comes in and tries to corrupt the woman's reasoning. Only this time, it's not a talking snake. (There's already been a snake in a tree&mash;or, rather, an obese dragon—in chapter 4, and it turned out to be friendly. The parallels with Genesis 3 are, perhaps, a bit on the nose.

Perelandra's "serpent" is a human being, Weston. Ransom notes that when he talks, it sounds like him and yet not like him. Clearly when Weston called his Force into himself, he became possessed by something, and we can take a good guess who or what that is meant to be.

The biblical Eden had its one rule: "Don't eat fruit from that tree over there." Similarly, so does the Edenic Perelandra: "Don't spend the night on that island over there." With Eve, the serpent started his temptation by corrupting the one simple rule God had given her: "Did God actually say, 'You shall not eat of any tree in the garden'?" (Genesis 3:1). Weston's temptation of the Green Lady is, perhaps, even more subtle: he doesn't change the rule, but appeals to the letter of it. Surely a ban on living on the Fixed Land doesn't entail not imagining living on it. Weston rightly points out that Earthlings make up stories all the time for their own amusement, not recognizing any sin in the act of creating fiction. (In 1941, two years before Perelandra, Lewis's friend Dorothy L, Sayers had published The Mind of the Maker, a work of literary theory in which she argues that the act of literary creation mirrors the relationship between the Persons of the Trinity.) Of course, Weston's suggestion is more subversive, implying that perhaps the original rule wasn't so good, after all.

There might also be a perversion here of Ransom's talk with the Lady in chapter 6, when he tells her that there is no rule on Earth against sleeping on fixed land. Of course, Ransom's intent is benign, intending only to inform her that since all of Earth's land is fixed, no such rule would be possible. If Weston's assertion that the Lady is allowed to imagine living on the Fixed Land is a way of subverting the rule against actually living there, then perhaps he is trying also to appeal to a sense of envy by telling her other people get to live on their own fixed land, so why not her, too?

Weston also makes roughly the same appeal to vanity that the serpent does with Eve. The latter had subverted God's rule by insinuating that eating the forbidden fruit would make Adam and Eve as wise as God, and he did not want that. Similarly, West suggests to the Green Lady that Maleldil has not instructed her on these matters specifically because he has stepped aside and allowed Weston and Ransom to teach her. She will become worldy and wise, like the women of Earth, whom Weston says are, "as it were, little Maleldils." ("You will be like God, knowing good and evil.") The Lady trusts the "older" King in all things, but Weston assures her that with his instruction, she can be the "older" one. He seeks to "free" her from the authority of both her God and her man.

Earth, or Thulcandra, is a fallen planet. It is the "silent planet" of the previous novel's title, because it is quarantined from the rest of the Solar System following the corruption of its Oyarsa, the angelic being who watched over it. Malacandra suffered collateral damage from Thulcandra's fall, but its rational beings still live at peace and in communion with Maleldil. However, Perelandra is still an unfallen world. The Green Lady has now come under the influence of a malevolent spirit in the possessed Weston, and clearly the mission on which the Oyarsa of Malacandra has sent Ransom is to prevent Perelandra's fall. The next chapter is the midpoint of Perelandra, so there's plenty of drama to play out.

Perelandra: Chapter 7

2026-06-28T09:00:00.000-04:00

So, as I was saying…

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. Unless you're the sort of person who likes skipping to the last page, go read the book first.

When we last left our heroes, philologist Elwin Ransom had been sent on a mission to the planet Venus (also known as Perelandra) by the unseen Oyarsa, the spirit being who rules the planet Malacandra (the native name for Mars; see Out of the Silent Planet). His coffin-like conveyance splashed down on Perelandra, a planet wholly covered with ocean and floating mats of vegetation that pass for land.

The floating rafts and temperate climate provided for all of Ransom's needs. Soon he met other intelligent life: the Green Lady, a young, humanoid woman—green-skinned, unclothed and wholly innocent—whom Ransom recognized as Venus's "Eve." The Green Lady had a personal rapport with Maleldil, the spirit being ruling the solar system. She could not find her male counterpart, whom she called the King. She and the King were the only human(ish) inhabitants of Perelandra.

Ransom and the Green Lady visited the Fixed Land, a rocky island that is Perelandra's only true landmass, initially to explore it and satisfy the Lady's curiosity. However, when they saw an object fall into the sea, only the Fixed Land had high enough ground to observe the object. It was a metal sphere like the one in which Ransom had been abducted to Mars by the physicist Weston in Out of the Silent Planet. On the beach, they indeed found Weston, who had come ashore. He was curious how Ransom too came to be there.

Weston's attitude displays a certain amount of chutzpah, as though Ransom is intruding on his territory. To Ransom's surprise, he now speaks Old Solar, the universal language of the solar system apart from Earth. The Green Lady, mindful of Maleldil's rule against sleeping on the Fixed Land, wants to return to the floating islands. However, Ransom cannot accompany her; Weston prevents him from leaving at gunpoint. Seeing both Ransom and the Lady without clothes, Weston assumes the worst, in spite of Ransom's attempts to persuade him that their nakedness is completely natural and innocent here.

As they gather Weston's things and bring them ashore, Weston tells Ransom he is hurt by his hostility toward him. He says he had been mistaken about the "whole interplanetary problem" on Malacandra. His argument to Oyarsa had been in defence of whatever it took to ensure the biological survival of the human species. He has since rejected the "unscientific dichotomy" between man and nature, become a believer in emergent evolution, and now sees human destiny in more spiritual terms. Evolution is purposefully (though impersonally) driven forward by a mystical life-force. He claims now to serve this Force, which has chosen him as its instrument and guides his actions; he has committed totally to following its guidance wherever it leads.

But when Ransom points out that this total commitment is a point of contact between their moral frameworks, Weston becomes angry, declares, "I am the Universe…your God and your Devil," summoning the Force into himself. After a moment of panic in which he cries out for Ransom's help, Weston convulses and lapses into unconsciousness. Ransom takes Weston's revolver and throws it into the sea. He tries to sleep on the beach—much less comfortable than the floating islands—and wishes he'd never set eyes on the Fixed Land.

This is a very philosophical chapter, and that's probably the main reason why I've stalled on this chapter for so long. (Almost 10 months! I was intending to finish these books by the end of 2025.) Its centrepiece is the dialogue between Weston and Ransom about how the former's philosophy has evolved since Out of the Silent Planet.

That first novel of this trilogy was clearly and openly inspired by the science fiction of H. G. Wells, whom Lewis acknowledges in his dedication). Wells's novel War of the Worlds was a critique of European colonialism. The Weston of Out of the Silent Planet is a materialist and a colonialist: just as Wells's technologically superior Martians had invaded Earth in search of food, Weston used his own advanced technology (the spherical spacecraft, reminiscent of the Cavorite sphere from another of Wells's books, The First Men in the Moon) to invade Mars in search of gold. Like the Earthlings of Wells's novel, the Martians of Lewis's are expendable.

Lewis, in turn, wrote Out of the Silent Planet as a critique of Wells's technocratic utopianism, in which man could be improved through science and social engineering. It was mankind's reponsibility to take control of his own evolutionary future, transcend his biological limitations and expand to the stars. Lewis saw this as scientism: faith in progress without spiritual purpose or moral grounding. Malacandra is the anti-Wellsian planet: it is a Utopia, though not because its rational species had achieved that state through the violence, competition, and technological advancement of evolution, but because they live within a transcendental moral order revealed by Maleldil.

H. G. Wells never responded to Lewis's critique, at least publicly. Of course, at this time Lewis was still relatively unknown, so it's possible Wells neither knew nor cared.

However, when he arrives on Perelandra, Weston is no longer a materialist. Now he is a mystic who claims to serve the metaphysical Force that guides human evolution toward its final purpose. He identifies this Force as Spirit, indeed as the Holy Spirit, though not as the personal and divine Spirit of Christian theology: as Ransom objects, Christians do not believe the Holy Spirit is a "blind, inarticulate purposiveness." Weston discards his objection as one of the "outworn theological technicalities" that Ransom can't let go of.

Weston has embraced a sort of pantheism, or perhaps panentheism¹. He worships the Force because it is pure spirit, as though that in itself made it worthy of worship: though, as Ransom counters, "there are spirits and spirits.… [A] thing might be a spirit and not good for you." But Weston rejects dualism of any kind; there is no difference between good and evil, between God and the Devil. God is the final purpose for which Weston is working; the Devil, he says, is the reaching forward for that purpose. "The world leaps forward through great men and greatness always transcends mere moralism," he says. "When the leap has been made our 'diabolism' as you would call it becomes the morality of the next stage." Just as Weston collapses the ontological distinction between God and the Devil, he also collapses the ethical distinction between good and evil. He avers that if the Force told him to, he would betray England to the Nazis or publish lies as scientific fact.

All this comes to a climax at the end of the discourse, when an exasperated Weston confesses his pantheism: "There is no possible distinction in concrete thought between me and the universe.… Do you see, you timid, scruple-mongering fool? I am the Universe." He reiterates his indifference to good and evil: "I, Weston, am your God and your Devil."

And, finally, he utters the words that are his undoing: "I call that Force into me completely.…” He has a moment of horror in which he pleads for Ransom's help, before going into convulsions and lapsing into a coma. As we shall see in future chapters, Weston has allowed himself to be possessed by something malevolent. As Ransom warned him, there are spirits and spirits, and the Force is the wrong variety. Despite the pretense of Weston's newfound philosophy, the distinction between good and evil, between God and Satan, is in fact very real.

As I said at the beginning of this post, this was a difficult chapter, at least intellectually, and that's the main reason I delayed for so long in getting this post out. I intended to sit back and mull it over for a couple of weeks, and that turned into nearly ten months. Things should go a lot more smoothly now, and you can expect chapter 8 in a week's time—as originally intended.

Footnote

¹ Pantheism says that the divine and the universe are identical. Panentheism believes that the universe is only part of God's total being, and he extends beyond space and time. Pantheists say "All is God"; panentheists say "All is in God."

You might be a flat-earther if...

2026-01-15T21:25:00.001-05:00

I see a lot of flat-earth stuff on Facebook. I don't know how if any of it is sincere, or if most or all of it is just engagement farming or flamebait. I just know I can't look away. The amount of utter ignorance apparently on display astounds me.

It's been well understood for millennia that the earth was spherical. Simple observation proved that: ships leaving port didn't just appear to get smaller as they sailed away; they disappeared from the bottom up as though going over a hill. The shadow cast on the moon during a lunar eclipse was always a circle; only a sphere casts a circular shadow from all angles.

In the third century BC, Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the earth using a couple of sticks and high-school geometry. Some of his assumptions were off (for example, the exact distance and bearing from Alexandria and Syene), but his methodology was sound. Columbus wasn't trying to prove the world was round; that was understood. The dispute was over its size, and whether Asia wa reachable by sailing west from Europe. (Obviously, it wasn't. It was fortunate for Columbus that North America was in the way. He thought the globe was much smaller.) Enlightenment intellectuals in the 18th and 19th centuries concocted the myth that the ancients believed the world to be flat, in order to portray religion as anti-reason. In reality, educated people knew the earth was a sphere. That people today will seriously entertain the notion that we live on a planar surface just goes to show how un-educated we have become.

Here are two basic proofs that the earth is spherical—one negative and one positive—that should be understandable to anyone. I'm no scientist; my science and math education is high-school level (with a year of university engineering thrown in; I dropped out). Fortunately, all you really need is a good grasp of basic geometry.

A negative proof

Fundamentally, flat-earth geography simply does not work. The majority of flat-earthers will point to an azimuthal equidistant projection such as Gleason's New Standard Map of the World, which is consistent with flat-earth claims of the earth being a disc with the North Pole at the centre and an "ice wall" around its circumference. An azimuthal projection is useful for representing accurate distances from the centre point. However, on Gleason's map, the farther south you get, the more distorted the projection gets. Southern continents like Australia get stretched in the east-west direction, and Antarctica, which is larger only than Australia if you exclude its ice shelves, becomes a massive ring around the perimeter, bigger than all the other land masses together. Two southern-hemisphere cities like Sydney, Australia and Buenos Aires, Argentina are approximately 11,800 kilometers apart, but appear practically on opposite sides of the map. Tokyo is about 18,400 km from Buenos Aires, but it appears closer than Sydney.

Different map projections are useful for certain purposes by preserving some characteristic of the Earth's geography, but no flat map can perfectly depict the geography of Earth in every respect: each one still distorts distance, bearing, direction, shape, and/or area. That's because every map is a projection of a curved surface. Only one map can accurately represent all of those characteristics. That is a globe.

Flat-earthers don't even agree on the map. Most advocate for an azimuthal projection, but some will dispute whether the earth has one pole or two, whether Antarctica is a regular continent or an "ice wall" ringing the world, and so forth. With the surveying technology available to us today, you might imagine that producing an accurate flat map of a flat surface would be easy. But it's never been done—or, as far as I know, even tried. Flat-earthism utterly fails to describe the world as we know it to be.

A positive proof

Sailors figured out very early on how to determine their latitude by measuring the altitude of certain celestial bodies, such as the sun or Polaris, the North Star. We all know that Polaris sits almost directly above the North Pole, making it appear as though the entire (northern) sky rotates around it. By sighting Polaris, measuring its altitude (angle above the horizon), a navigator could directly measure his latitude. For example, I live in Ottawa, which is at 45.4° north. If I look at Polaris at night, my sight line is at about 45 degrees to the horizon.

Consider the following locations in the Americas:

Resolute, Nunavut
Whitehorse, Yukon
Ottawa, Ontario
New Orleans, Louisiana
Guatemala City, Guatemala
Quito, Ecuador

I've chosen them because their latitudes are approximately 15-degree intervals. If they were aligned on the same line of longitude, they would be pretty evenly distributed at around 1,700 km apart.

Sightings of Polaris from a globe

To a person at the North Pole, Polaris is directly overhead: an altitude of 90°. In Resolute, he would see it at an altitude of 75°; in Whitehorse, at 60° and so forth. Quito is almost directly on the equator, so Polaris would have an altitude of 0°—directly on the horizon.¹ If you could draw those sight lines in the air from the observers to Polaris, you would discover that they are, for all practical purposes, parallel (Polaris is 450 light years from earth, so the angle of the light that reaches the North Pole and Quito differs by trillionths of a degree). Clearly our observers are all looking at the same thing.

Sightings of Polaris from a flat earth.

But if we assume the surface of the earth is flat, we have a problem. In Ottawa² I sight Polaris at a 45° altitude. But someone in New Orleans sighting at an altitude of 30° is looking right past Polaris. In fact, it's evident that these seven observers are either not looking at the same object, or they're not observing it at the correct angle, or we're mistaken about their latitude. They couldn't actually be evenly spaced; the distance between them would be greater the farther south we went—and division by zero would put Quito an infinite distance away from the North Pole!

Even more, if the altitude of Polaris in Ottawa is 45°, then Polaris, the North Pole, and Ottawa are the corners of a right isosceles triangle. That means Polaris is as far above the North Pole as the North Pole is from Ottawa: 5,000 km. But if you're viewing Polaris from New Orleans (6,675 km from the North Pole) at an angle of 30°, then it must be only 3,854 km above the pole.

Celestial navigation is based on the earth having a spherical surface; indeed, it only works on a globe. Try to use the same methodology to navigate on a flat earth, and the math is contradictory and incoherent. You'll get lost.

You don't need to be an astronomer or scientist to understand why the earth is not flat. I'm not. I just paid attention in class. How can you tell if someone didn't pay attention? They submit obvious howlers as devastating proof that the earth is flat.

If you believe the earth's surface is planar, but you can't find an accurate map of it, you might be a flat-earther.
If you believe the sun and moon are small and located just above the earth, but you can't explain why they're not always visible everywhere all the time, you might be a flat-earther.
If you believe Antarctica is actually an "ice wall" surrounding the earth, but you can't explain how a small and local sun can provide 24-hour daylight in the south from September to March while leaving the North Pole in 24-hour darkness, you might be a flat-earther.
If you believe there is no such thing as the south pole, but you can't explain why the sky appears to rotate around two points—one in the north and one in the south—you might be a flat-earther.
If you can't explain why the sky rotates clockwise in some places and counterclockwise in others, you might be a flat-earther.
If you can't explain why someone in Australia can never see the North Star or someone in Canada can never see the Southern Cross, you might be a flat-earther.
If you are an Australian, you might inexplicably be a flat-earther.
If you believe that an azimuthal equidistant projection map is the best representation of the earth, but you can't explain why the shortest distance for direct flights between Australia and Chile don't go over the Arctic, you might be a flat-earther.
If you claim that on a globe you shouldn't be able to see a city skyline from 100 km away because of the curvature, but you can't explain why you don't see the bottom half of the buildings, you might be a flat-earther.
If you can't explain why there's a horizon at all, you might be a flat-earther.
If you say gravity is really just density or buoyancy, but you can't identify the force causing denser or less buoyant objects to fall downward instead of some other direction, you might be a flat-earther.
If you fail to understand that you can't explain density or buoyancy without gravity, you might be a flat-earther.

Footnotes

To be precise, Quito is just south of the equator—just far enough that you can't actually see the North Star there. For the sake of argument, I'm taking a little creative liberty and assuming it sits directly on the equator.
I'm using Ottawa as my reference simply because that's where I am and what I can observe. The argument here would be the same anywhere else.

And now ... this (Sept. 24/25)

2025-09-24T12:44:00.001-04:00

Did anyone get raptured yesterday? Anyone?

According to Joshua Mhlakela, a South African pastor, the Rapture was supposed to take place yesterday. Mhlakela claims he had a visit from Jesus, who personally revealed that he would come for his church on September 23 or 24, aligning with this year's Rosh Hashana. The Rapture prediction got traction on social media, mainly TikTok.

Mhlakela claimed to be "a billion percent sure" of his prediction. Perhaps he should have exercised just a little more skepticism.

At least he just outright lied and claimed Jesus told him. So we can be thankful we didn't have to wade through something like the late Harold Camping's impenetrable math proofs to find out he was full of bull.

No Perelandra chapter this week

2025-09-17T12:18:00.000-04:00

I mean, you may have noticed.

Basically, between some personal matters and the news cycle of the last week or so, I've found myself either too busy or too preoccupied with other things to get beyond reading chapter 7 of Perelandra. So with next Sunday now closer than the last, I've decided just to leave it until this weekend rather than effectively double up. It's a significant chapter, anyway, and the extra time will be beneficial. It's worth doing right.

Perelandra: Chapter 6

2025-09-07T22:16:00.004-04:00

Ransom has been sent on a voyage to Perelandra, or Venus, by the Oyarsa of Mars. There, he discovered that Venus is an ocean planet with giant floating mats of vegetation that serve as land. There, he also met a green-skinned woman, and through conversing with her in Old Solar, the lingua franca of the solar system outside of Earth, discovered that she is destined to be the mother of all Perelandrians: the Venusian Eve, as it were.

The archipelago of floating islands have joined into a temporary continent. Still exploring, Ransom comes to the edge of the "land" and, across the sea, spots what appears to be proper land: an actual island with a giant stone column or mountain. The Lady calls it the Fixed Land, and informs Ransom that while she may visit it, Maleldil has forbidden her or the King to sleep there. She is confused, and somewhat horrified, when Ransom informs her that all the land on Earth is fixed, and they have no such rule there.

As they contemplate this, they spot something falling into the ocean from the sky.

He and the Lady travel to the Fixed Land, riding the backs of silver, porpoise-like fish. When they reach the island, they explore it, Ransom happy to be on Earth-like terrain again, though the flora and fauna are alien.

When they climb some of the rocks to look out over the sea, Ransom spots the object that fell from Deep Heaven. It is a spherical vessel, which he recognizes as the same as the one in which Professor Weston had taken him to Malacandra. A figure leaves the sphere in a small boat and approaches the shore. Warning the Green Lady to stay away from him, Ransom goes to the beach to confront him. It is Weston, who recognizes him and demands to know why he is there.

Up to now, we haven't had an antagonist in this novel, but one has arrived in the person of Weston. He was the physicist who, with the help of Ransom's old school friend Devine, abducted him to Mars, supposedly to offer as a human sacrifice to the Martians. Weston's own intent was to exploit Malacandra's resources, particularly its plentiful gold. But he also believed in a kind of scientistic progressivism in which it was humanity's duty to expand to the stars, echoing such contemporary scientific materialists as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and Olaf Stapledon, whose views on human expansionism Lewis found repulsive.

Weston's plans for Mars were thwarted by Ransom with the help of the spiritual eldila that inhabit Malacandra, who tampered with Weston's sphere so that it disappeared once they returned to Earth. Clearly, Weston has built another. His outfit, shorts and a pith helmet, is very much the picture of a stereotypical English explorer. Is his outfit a hint to his colonial intent? Having failed to claim Mars for humanity, is he trying again on Venus?

The Green Lady, the Perelandrian native, is naked and unashamed because she is in a state of innocence. Ransom is a guest on this planet, naked by order of Oyarsa, but as the inhabitant of a fallen world, ashamed by his appearance. Weston alone is both clothed and unashamed: the man who has fallen from Deep Heaven and entered this edenic world on his own initiative, for purposes yet unknown. (Does Weston remind you of anyone? Hope you guess his name.)

Ransom is again upset by the distress he has caused the Green Lady: this time, when he mentions that all the land on earth is fixed and there can be no law against sleeping there. In her innocence, she cannot conceive of something being wrong in one place but not another, until Maleldil assures her it is so.

This is not simplistic moral relativism. Obviously, the Perelandrian law against sleeping on the Fixed Land is analogous to the prohibition against eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 2:16-17). That prohibition had a purpose: it was covenantal, part of the relational agreement between God and Adam. Obedience to the rule signified trust in God's goodness and wisdom; when the serpent tempted Eve, he did so by questioning God's goodness and undermining her trust. (Coincidentally, this was the topic of the sermon at church this morning.)

On Perelandra, the analogous rule is against sleeping on the Fixed Land. Is this why Ransom is here—to protect Perelandra from its own Fall by stopping its serpent (Weston?) from tempting its Eve?

Ransom thinks the mountain on the Fixed Land resembles the Giant's Causeway, a geologic formation in Northern Ireland consisting of thousands of basaltic columns. This suggests that the Fixed Land is of volcanic origin, which seems consistent with what we know today of Venus. I'm not sure how to square this kind of violent upheaval with a planet that's supposed to be unfallen. (Then again, it is just geology…)

What is Weston's intent on traveling to Venus? Will Ransom finally discover his mission? Chapter 7 comes next week.

Perelandra: Chapter 5

2025-09-02T16:42:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. I recommend reading the book first. It's short, I promise.

Yes, late yet again. I should just aim for Sunday and make the official release date Tuesday. (Except then I'll probably slip until Thursday.)

Elwin Ransom, philologist, was sent to Venus by Oyarsa, the spirit that rules Mars, which planet Ransom visited in captivity in Out of the Silent Planet, the first volume of the Space Trilogy. Venus (known outside of Earth as Perelandra) is an ocean world with giant floating vegetation mats. On his first day he discovered forests with trees bearing food; on his second, he became acquainted with a dragon-like creature that also inhabited his island. He also discovered that Venus has intelligent life: a green woman visiting a neighbouring island, who apparently mistook him for someone else. They could speak to each other in the universal tongue of the solar system, and he resolved to visit her island.

The next morning, Ransom finds that his island and the Green Lady's are only a few feet apart, and several islands have (temporarily?) formed a floating continent. The Lady is right there, singing to herself and plaiting together some flowers, and she initiates a conversation with him. This chapter is heavy on dialogue and light on action, so rather than my habitual plot summary, I'm going to talk about key points in their discussion.

The Green Lady's first words to Ransom are, "I was young yesterday." He doesn't initially understand what she means by that: taking her words at face value, he remarks that she's not that much older now. But she is speaking of her understanding. If I understand the discourse correctly, she finds it strange that Ransom speaks of time and life in terms of past, present, and future; she experiences life in the present moment. As they talk, she is also conversing with Maleldil, who is helping her understand what Ransom is saying.

Maleldil is the chief of all the spiritual beings in Deep Heaven (outer space, the solar system). The hierarchy of life was explained in Out of the Silent Planet: at the bottom are beasts, and above them, hnau (reasoning creatures); then eldila (spiritual creatures), and above all, Maleldil. He is, in other words, God—and it is him who is feeding the Green Lady information while she talks with Ransom.

Think back to Genesis and the creation story: "they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day" (Gen. 3:8). Adam and Eve were accustomed to having the personal presence of God with them in Eden, before the Fall. Clearly, the Green Lady is intended to be the Venusian Eve, and we're meant to understand that Perelandra is yet in an unfallen state. If the paradisaical state of Venus, with its warm climate, delicious fruit, and benign wildlife aren't clues enough, here also we have an utterly innocent—and naked and unashamed—woman who has everyday conversations with Maleldil.

She is aware that there are other worlds, and that Ransom comes from Earth. This bewilders Ransom, because with Venus's constant cloud cover, she cannot possibly observe the night sky. He also wonders why it is that she is shaped like a human woman: he saw no humanoid creatures when he was taken to Mars. The Lady's response is that Malacandra is an older world than either Earth or Venus. On Earth, God created man in his own image (Gen. 1:26). Then God himself became man: "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1:14). If God made man in his image, and then himself took on man's image, why expect Reason to ever appear in another form? "'And after this,' said Ransom, 'it will all be men'"—perhaps sad to see such creatures as he met on Mars fade away.

The Green Lady doesn't know the reason Maleldil became man; being perfectly innocent, Ransom cannot tell her about the Fall or the plan of redemption, which would corrupt her. Yet she knows a second reason, and she also cannot tell him. I wonder what that is? I don't remember whether that revelation comes elsewhere in the novel.

The next day, Ransom asks the Lady to meet her people, and she does not understand: she only knows one other person of her kind, the King, and does not know where he is. When he makes clear he means he wants to visit the place where her brothers and sisters and other kindred and her mother live. To this she replies: "I have a mother? What do you mean? I am the Mother." It is here that Ransom realizes he is not addressing another commoner like himself: the Green Lady is the Eve of Perelandra, the Queen to her King.

The chapter ends on a bit of a sour note. Ransom brings up their first meeting, and notes that when she realized he wasn't the King, she must have been disappointed. It results in, perhaps, an unintentional and small loss of innocence: "You make me grow older more quickly than I can bear," she says, and walks away. Ransom realizes that her innocence is a fragile thing, and he needs to be careful what he tells her.

I'm trying to be on time, I promise. So chapter 6 will ideally drop this coming Sunday.

September, again

2025-09-02T15:34:00.003-04:00

It's September, and that means it's time for the annual science-fiction moratorium. Originally I thought this idea up because my reading diet was almost exclusively sci-fi; however, this year, of the approximately 60 books I've read so far, only 10 of them have been. So as I branch out my literary interests, a moratorium seems to become increasingly irrelevant; but it's a habit I keep up, nonetheless.

Typically, I use September to broaden my literary horizons a bit: try something I've never read before or wouldn't pick up on impulse. This year, I've decided to keep it simple: get through William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. It's a classic work of World War II history that weighs approximately one anvil. I've owned my paperback copy for somewhat over 20 years and never read more than the first few chapters.

I just started Patrick O'Brian's The Surgeon's Mate, one of the volumes in his Aubrey-Maturin series of naval historical novels. I'll finish that before digging into Shirer. In the unlikely event that I finish Rise and Fall prematurely, I've still got about half of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled to finish off, and a whole bunch of classic Westerns I have yet to sample.

This won't affect my readthrough of Perelandra. The spirit of the rule is to open my mind a bit more, not to be abstemious, and not to cut short any projects I happen to have already in progress. I'm working on the installment for chapter 5 now, late as ever, and it should be posted shortly.

Let September begin!

Perelandra: Chapter 4

2025-08-26T22:30:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. You may well have a lot of reading ahead of you.

Late again! My fault, this time. Sorry.

Ransom has been sent on a space voyage to Perelandra, Venus in our language, by Oyarsa, the spiritual being that rules Malacandra, or Mars. He was propelled through space by supernatural means in a translucent casket. When he landed on Venus, the casket dissolved and he was left afloat in the ocean that apparently covered Perelandra, where the climate is warm and perpetually overcast with golden clouds. Soon he discovered the several large floating mats of vegetation that act as land on Perelandra. Climbing onto one, he found some food, consisting of some delicious golden gourds, and then he slept.

When Ransom awakens, he continues exploring. He finds a grove of the golden fruit, and for the first time discovers animal life: a red dragon-like creature, which appears friendly but not intelligent. Some large flowers whose stalks accumulate bubbles of water serve as an impromptu perfumed shower. He also finds some large berries for food that taste very good and satisfy his hunger, but as with the golden fruit the previous day, he feels an impulse not to overindulge.

As Ransom explores, the dragon (which has been making a nuisance of itself in the meantime) zooms past him and flies to another island floating about half a mile away. He sees that the air and the oceans are teeming with life, and it’s all heading in that direction. In particular, he sees a pod of dolphin-like fish, and on the back of one, a human figure. He gets the being’s attention, and he sees that the figure is a green-skinned woman—who, evidently, was expecting someone else.

When they are close enough to speak, he gets her in Old Solar, the language of Malacandra. To his surprise, the green lady, now surrounded by a throng of beasts, points and laughs. Ransom shortly discovers that he is heavily sunburned on one side and still pale on the other, thanks to his trip through space in the translucent casket. This is the source of her amusement. When her laughter has calmed down, he announces that he is from another world and comes in peace. The green lady has no idea what that means, asking, “What is ‘peace’?” Ransom swims for her island and pulls himself ashore.

Finally,the action is beginning. We meet another principal character, the Green Lady, who appears, Disney-esque fashion, surrounded by friendly animals. She does not understand his simple greeting or the meaning of “peace”; is she naïve or completely innocent? It’s evident she was expecting someone, but not Ransom. Is there a Green Man yet to be revealed?

At the beginning of the chapter, when Ransom sees the grove of golden fruit with the dragon, he thinks the scene resembles the Garden of the Hesperides. In Greek mythology, the Hesperides were the daughters of Atlas and Hesperis, daughter of Hesperus. From the latter comes the literary name of the planet Venus in its evening aspect (as opposed to Lucifer, the name of Venus as the morning star).

The Hesperides tended a garden of golden apples. The Apple of Discord, in the myth of Helen of Troy, was one of these. The Garden was guarded by a dragon, which in classical art is portrayed as serpentine—perhaps to call the snake in the Garden of Eden to mind?—whereas the Perelandrian dragon is described as rather obese and the size of a St. Bernard. For the article graphic, I’ve chosen to depict him as the classical serpent. (I’ve also clothed Ransom in shorts—I don’t think the AI will let me depict him naked, even if I wanted that on my blog.)

There’s a similar scene in the Narnia novel, The Magician’s Nephew, when Digory Kirke reaches the walled garden containg the silver apples that will heal his mother’s illness. There, the garden is overlooked by a bird whom Digory feels it would be unwise to cross by taking a second apple for himself. Just as Digory’s Uncle Andrew in Narnia resembles Weston in Out of the Silent Planet scheming to exploit Malacandra’s resources, this may be another instance of Lewis recycling imagery from the Space Trilogy for the Chronicles of Narnia.

Chapter 4 is, again, not an action-packed chapter, at least until the end. Lewis/Ransom is still exploring the Perelandrian environment, setting the stage for the story yet to come. Things will pick up soon, for sure. See you next time.

Perelandra: Chapter 3

2025-08-19T18:55:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. Unless you're the sort of person who likes skipping to the last page, go read the book first.

I'm late! Oh my ears and whiskers.

Narrator-C. S. Lewis was summoned to the country cottage of Elwin Ransom, who informs him he was commissioned by Oyarsa, the spiritual being that rules Malacandra (Mars), to go on a journey to Perelandra (Venus) for reasons as yet unknown. His transportation was a featureless casket, propelled there by Oyarsa himself. Lewis was charged with helping him into the casket, and helping him out again when he returns—if he returns.

Over a year later, Oyarsa summoned Lewis back to the cottage. He and Humphrey, a mutual doctor friend whom Lewis also recruited to help Ransom, witness the return of the casket and help Ransom out again. Ransom began telling the story of his trip to them.

Enclosed in the casket, with only a blindfold to protect him from sunlight in space, Ransom arrives on Venus. The casket dissolves around him, leaving him in open water. The entire surface of Venus is apparently an ocean, and the sky is golden, perpetually overcast. Ransom also discovers that while there is no land, there are a multitude of large floating mats of vegetation He swims for one and climbs on. Exploring, he finds a forest, where he finds some particularly delicious fruit. Then he falls asleep.

Little was known about Venus in 1943. Telescope observations had confirmed a dense cloud cover, but there was no way of knowing what was beneath. It was assumed to be warm, but there was speculation about what lay beneath the clouds: desert, ocean, or vegetation. In the previous chapter, Ransom says:

"Our astronomers don’t know anything about the surface of Perelandra at all. The outer layer of her atmosphere is too thick. The main problem, apparently, is whether she revolves on her own axis or not, and at what speed. There are two schools of thought. There’s a man called Schiaparelli who thinks she revolves once on herself in the same time it takes her to go once round Arbol—I mean, the Sun. The other people think she revolves on her own axis once in every twenty-three hours. That’s one of the things I shall find out."

Giovanni Schiaparelli (1835-1910) was an Italian astronomer best known for his seminal studies of Mars. It was Schiaparelli who first "discovered" the "channels" (translated as "canals" in English) on Mars. He actually made no assumptions about their origin; it was Percival Lowell who ran with the idea of Martian canals being the product of intelligent life. They were later proven to be optical illusions. Schiaparelli also observed Mercury and Venus, and calculated the day of Venus to be 224 Earth days, the same length as its year. He was almost right: Venus's day is actually 243 days long. Venus is also the only planet with a retrograde rotation, that is, clockwise as opposed to its counterclockwise orbit around the sun. Neither this nor Venus's inhospitable climate were known until the 1960s.

Lewis was creating a fictional Venus—one where Ransom could fight a cosmic battle with evil. But it's clear he was well aware of the scientific understanding of Venus of the time, and he blends this with his own imaginative speculation. The same is true of his portrayal of Mars in Out of the Silent Planet.

A significant moment in this chapter is when Ransom discovers yellow fruit in the floating forest. He finds eating the fruit to be indescribably pleasurable. Yet, as he reaches for another one, he realizes, against all reason, that it might be better not to repeat the pleasure. It seems to parallel another discussion—a flashback at the beginning of the chapter, in which narrator-Lewis recounts

a sceptical friend of ours called McPhee was arguing against the Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the human body. I was his victim at the moment and he was pressing on me in his Scots way with such questions as “So you think you’re going to have guts and palate for ever in a world where there’ll be no eating, and genital organs in a world without copulation? Man, ye’ll have a grand time of it!” when Ransom suddenly burst out with great excitement, “Oh, don’t you see, you ass, that there’s a difference between a trans-sensuous life and a non-sensuous life?” That, of course, directed McPhee’s fire to him. What emerged was that in Ransom’s opinion the present functions and appetites of the body would disappear, not because they were atrophied but because they were, as he said “engulfed.” He used the word “trans-sexual” I remember and began to hunt about for some similar words to apply to eating (after rejecting “trans-gastronomic”), and since he was not the only philologist present, that diverted the conversation into different channels. But I am pretty sure he was thinking of something he had experienced on his voyage to Venus.

Of course, "trans-sexual" has a completely different connotation today. But Ransom's retort says that in the resurrection, humans (being both physical and spiritual) will will experience life on a level that transcends mere human appetites (gastronomical or sexual) or sensory experience. It feels to me that Ransom's experience with the fruit is along the same lines. Following one's gastronomic appetite, it would make sense to have another fruit. But the experience itself is a spiritual one, and hence it would be a "vulgarity" to merely repeat it: "like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day."

That Ransom thinks this way at all suggests that the spiritual environment of Venus is very different from Earth, where such transcendent experiences are nonexistent, and of course we indulge (and overindulge) in sensual experiences all the time.

Not much happens in this chapter; we're still in the introductory section of ''Perelandra''. But it will pick up soon. Stay tuned for chapter 4 on Sunday—hopefully on time this week.

Perelandra: Chapter 2

2025-08-10T17:53:00.000-04:00

The story so far: The narrator (a fictional version of Lewis himself) was summoned by his friend Professor Ransom on "business," which he understood to mean business having to do with Ransom's trip to Malacandra (Mars), as narrated in the previous novel, Out of the Silent Planet. Walking along the darkened road from the train to Ransom's cottage, he experienced a heavy feeling of oppression. When Lewis arrived at the cottage, he found it deserted, but in Ransom's hallway was a translucent, coffin-like box, and a strange shaft of light he recognized as an eldil, one of the spiritual inhabitants of Malacandra, with whom Ransom still communicated.

At the very end, Ransom finally returns to his cottage. He is relieved to learn that Lewis was not hindered by the "barrage" along the way: the oppressive feelings were real, caused by the dark eldila of Earth. He tells Lewis that they have gotten wind of what he is doing. The Oyarsa of Mars is sending Ransom on a voyage to Perelandra (Venus)—conveying him personally—and the vehicle is the coffin in the cottage.

Ransom does not know how long his trip will last or if he will even return. Lewis is there to pack him into the box. Ransom also charges him with coming back to unpack him, if and when he returns, and with recruiting a trusted successor in case Lewis himself is no longer alive. Lewis also decides to confide in Humphrey, a mutual doctor friend.

Lewis and Ransom carry the box outside and Lewis helps him inside—naked, with nothing but a blindfold to protect his eyes from sunlight. Then Ransom is taken away. Lewis does not see how.

More than a year later, Oyarsa summons Lewis. He and Humphrey return to Ransom's cottage, where they see the coffin descend from the sky. While the two earthbound men are a bit worse for wear, thanks to the ongoing war, Ransom himself looks healthy and even younger. He has a wound on his heel, however, which will not heal. Ransom relates his story over breakfast.

Like Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra involves Ransom being taken on a space voyage, each time by a means unexplained to the reader: to Malacandra in an H. G. Wells-esque sphere designed by the scientist Weston with an unexamined propulsion system, and to Perelandra in a mere box, transported supernaturally, with Oyarsa himself the means of propulsion.

Lewis reminds us that Elwin Ransom is a philologist (established in Out of the Silent Planet). Philology is a branch of linguistics dealing with the historical development of language over time. Ransom's profession helped him learn the Malacandrian language, or Hressa-Hlab. He expresses some disappointment that it is actually the lingua franca of the solar system, Old Solar or Hlab-Eribolef-Cordi, and so he won't get to solve the same problem on Venus. C. S. Lewis was not a philologist, but his friend J. R. R. Tolkien was. As he wrote in his autobiography, "Friendship with [Tolkien] marked the breakdown of two old prejudices. At my first coming into the world I had been (implicitly) warned never to trust a Papist, and at my first coming into the English Faculty (explicitly) never to trust a philologist. Tolkien was both."¹ Lewis's 1960 book Studies in Words is about how a handful of significant English words have changed meaning over the ages, and could be considered a work in philology.²

Ransom jokes, in a self-deprecating manner, about "setting out single-handed to combat powers and principalities." This is an allusion to Ephesians 6:12. This immediately precedes the famous passage about the "whole armour of God," the practice of spiritual warfare, which the Bible describes primarily as practical holiness and effective apologetics (see Eph. 6:13-20 and 2 Corinthians 10:3-6). But here, there's a sense that Ransom expects to do some literal battle; as he interprets that same Ephesians verse, "When the Bible used that very expression about fighting with principalities and powers and depraved hyper-somatic beings at great heights (our translation is very misleading at that point, by the way) it meant that quite ordinary people were to do the fighting." The phrase Ransom renders "depraved hyper-somatic beings" is usually translated "spiritual wickedness" or "wicked spirits," and I'm not sure he's right about it being a bad translation.

Paul does mean there's a spiritual reality behind the "flesh and blood" we strive against, but what Ransom has in mind is clearly going beyond the practice of prayer, faith, and righteousness that Paul says are the weapons of spiritual warfare. The dark eldil of Earth (aka Thulcandra) are in conflict with the eldil of the other planets, and it seems as though Ransom is the proxy for the Malacandrian Oyarsa, doing battle against an enemy on Venus that is yet to be revealed.

The actual voyage to Venus is a story-within-a-story; the first two chapters, at least, are a frame story to set the context. There's no concluding chapter in which narrator-Lewis and Humphrey react to the tale Ransom has told them. With the end of this chapter, Lewis and Humphrey disappear from the narrative. From here on, it's Ransom's own story. See you next Sunday.

Footnotes

¹ Lewis, Surprised by Joy, Fadedpage, updated Sept. 7, 2023, accessed August 9, 2025, https://www.fadedpage.com/books/20150220/html.php.

² Lewis, Studies in Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960).

Perelandra: Chapter 1

2025-08-03T14:27:00.000-04:00

Today I begin my readthrough of Perelandra by C. S. Lewis, the second book of his Space Trilogy (also known as the "Cosmic Trilogy" or "Ransom Trilogy" in some editions). Sometimes alternatively titled "A Voyage to Venus," this short novel was originally published in 1943.

The story begins with the narrator (a fictionalized version of Lewis himself, presumably) travelling by train, then by foot, to the country cottage of Elwin Ransom, summoned there for "business"—which Lewis understands as something mysterious, and probably having to do with Ransom's previous voyage to Mars, aka Malacandra, as told in Out of the Silent Planet.

The road to Ransom's is dark. Perelandra was published in 1943 and presumably set in about the same time, so blackout regulations were in effect to prevent ground lighting from aiding enemy aircraft. There are darkened cottages and abandoned factories along the road, creating a foreboding atmosphere.

Lewis himself is gripped by unease. He realizes he has left his pack on the train and his first instinct is to return to the station, in spite of the fact that the train is long gone and there's nothing he can accomplish by returning rather than phoning the station in the morning. He is thinking constantly about the eldila, the incorporeal (spiritual?) intelligences Ransom met on Malacandra and apparently still speaks with from time to time. Lewis's fears, it seems, may not be entirely natural: perhaps some supernatural influence is holding him back.

When he arrives at Ransom's cottage, by now in a state of panic, it is empty but unlocked; inside, he discovers a coffin-like box made of something cold and translucent, resembling ice. Then he hears a voice calling for Ransom; the source is apparently a presence in the room that Lewis describes as a shaft of light that does not illuminate its environment. It is an eldil, Lewis realizes; indeed, it is Oyarsa, the ruler of Malacandra himself. Its presence seems to calm his panic. Just then Ransom returns and answers the eldil in its own language, and in spite of the horror he feels, Lewis is relieved to see him.

Lewis (the real one) does a good job of establishing the scene in this chapter. He could have just given a straight recap of Out of the Silent Planet. Instead, he gives a hint of what Ransom had experienced: his captive journey to Malacandra, meeting the inhabitants, and so forth, without giving too much of the story away. If the reader has not read the first novel already, he might be encouraged to do so, although as Lewis himself remarks in the preface, Perelandra can stand alone.

He also does a fine job of describing the eerie atmosphere along the walk and inside Ransom's cottage. In addition to the physical darkness caused by the war, accentuated by empty and ruined buildings, you get the sense that there's another kind of darkness about. The narrator's obsessive ruminations about eldila and alien beings aren't helping his state of mind—but it's almost as though a malevolent, oppressive force is also influencing him on his journey. He has sought excuse after excuse to abandon his visit: the darkness, the loss of his pack, the question of Ransom's sanity or whether his alien friends were good or evil. It is only when he encounters the eldil in the cottage that this oppression is lifted.

Finally, we start to get a sense of how Ransom has changed. In Out of the Silent Planet, he's a fairly straighforward stock character, a kind of reluctant hero or adventurer: someone thrust against his will into unusual circumstances who develops the courage to face his fears and help defeat the plans of Weston and Devine. But narrator-Lewis remarks that since his encounter with the Malacandrians, he's become otherworldly. It's like he's suffered a nervous breakdown, but narrator-Lewis knows that Ransom is as sane as anyone. One does not have a direct encounter with angels and leave unchanged.

I thought this was a great bit of prose, describing how disorienting the eldil was:

It was not at right angles to the floor. But as soon as I have said this, I hasten to add that this way of putting it is a later reconstruction. What one actually felt at the moment was that the column of light was vertical but the floor was not horizontal—the whole room seemed to have heeled over as if it were on board ship. The impression, however produced, was that this creature had reference to some horizontal, to some whole system of directions, based outside the Earth, and that its mere presence imposed that alien system on me and abolished the terrestrial horizontal.

How else can one describe a being that is so…right, it brings its own frame of reference with it and throws yours off-kilter?

Chapter 1 sets up the story, so I have little to say about it now. It does a good job of establishing the scene and setting the atmosphere, but the story will pick up later. We'll continue next Sunday with chapter 2.

Introducing the Space Trilogy readthrough

2025-08-02T22:17:00.002-04:00

I suppose I may be one of the relatively few people—Christians, at least—who appreciate C. S. Lewis more as a man of letters than an apologist.

Though I'm sure my route to discovering Lewis is the same as many others': I read the Chronicles of Narnia in about third or fourth grade. (Still have that paperback box set, too.) Then, in university, I found a stash of his nonfiction books in the school library: short books like Broadcast Talks and Beyond Personality, two of the three titles that were edited into Mere Christianity. And, of course, The Screwtape Letters, still probably my favourite piece of satire.

But it was in 1991 that I borrowed Lewis's Space Trilogy for the first time from the public library in Huntsville, where I was living that winter. And as much as I appreciated Narnia, it was through Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength that I came to love Lewis as an author.

Less so as an apologist or a theologian. The revelation in The Last Battle that Aslan reckoned sincere worship of Tash as worship of himself never sat right with me even as a ten-year-old who couldn't define theology, let alone explain it. And his theory of the atonement, as expressed in Mere Christianity—Christ confessing sin vicariously as the "perfect penitent"—also rankles me. I don't question the genuineness of Lewis's faith, but he had his weak spots. As we all do, I'm sure.

As a preteen or early teen, I discovered science fiction, starting with Asimov and Clarke. It wasn't long before I found H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, too, particularly The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon, Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, and Journey to the Center of the Earth. They weren't the hard(ish) SF I had been accustomed to, being as much in the realm of fantasy as science fiction, but I enjoyed the style nonetheless. Out of the Silent Planet was a clear homage to the stories of men like Wells and Verne, as Lewis himself acknowledges in his preface.

I last read Out of the Silent Planet in 2004, and wrote a review then. Re-reading the novel (and the review) a few weeks ago, I don't find that I've changed my opinion at all. So while officially this is a readthrough of the Space Trilogy, in practice I'm going to deem Out of the Silent Planet done, and start instead with Perelandra.

When I read through the Chronicles of Amber last year, I settled on a rate of two chapters per week. That was doable, but it kept me busy. For this series, I'm going to stick to one chapter per week. There are 34 chapters total in the remaining two novels, and only 21 weeks left in the year, so I'm going to overrun into 2026. Which is fine; I'll just choose to read through something a bit less ambitious next year.

I have a paper copy—a paperback omnibus that calls the series the "Cosmic Trilogy" instead—but I'll be reading from ebooks instead. Fortunately, C. S. Lewis is in the public domain in Canada (though maybe not in your country, so let your conscience be your guide), and all three novels can be downloaded from Fadedpage:

Feel free to read along. Hopefully, the first chapter of Perelandra drops tomorrow, although it might be delayed—I haven't found my writing-editing-posting rhythm just yet.

And now . . . this - Jan. 3/25

2025-01-03T10:40:00.003-05:00

According to a news release from the Hamilton Police Service, on Dec. 18, a man entered a BMO branch over the lunch hour. Having cycled to the bank in Hamilton’s Westcliffe East neighbourhood, the modern-day Jesse James left his wheeled steed outside, and proceeded indoors.…

Upon exiting the bank, and looking for his bike, the thief was reportedly “dazed and confused” upon realizing that some other enterprising bandito had made off with his bicycle.

[Full Story]

Like the man said: instant karma's gonna get you. I'm sure police are looking for the bike thief, too—though hopefully not too hard

2024 reading review

2025-01-01T16:39:00.000-05:00

It's the year 2525! (Well…2025, but you can't begrudge me a little bit of enthusiasm.) Time to review my year with books (this is not a book blog, I keep reminding myself).

As usual, my annual goal is to read 50 books of any kind. Last year, my final count was in the 70s. This year, it was…120. (My "official" count at Goodreads is 105, but several of those are actually omnibus volumes.) The average page count per book is still around 300, too. I wonder where I found the extra freet time. Maybe I didn't fall asleep as often.

The first book of the year was Emily's Quest by L. M. Montgomery, the final book in her Emily trilogy. Maybe it's juvenile, maybe it's girly, and maybe I started reading Montgomery in my teens to impress a girl. Nonetheless, over the years, Montgomery has become my favourite Canadian author.

The last novel of the year was Cyteen by C. J. Cherryh, which I finished on the weekend before Christmas. This is an SF novel from 1988 (which won the Hugo in 1989) about the implications of mass human cloning and designing human beings for specific functions. (A little bit like Blade Runner in that respect, I guess.) It's long, and I found it slow starting, but I got into it after a while. A good comeback, considering I didn't really enjoy reading Downbelow Station last year.

My newest book was In Too Deep by Lee and Andrew Child. As I said last year, as long as the Jack Reacher books keep coming out in October, and I keep reading them as soon as possible, this is going to be a recurring theme every year.

The oldest was Journey to the West by Wu Cheng'en, one of the great Chinese novels. I also finished reading the plays of Aphra Behn, the Restoration dramatist. But Journey to the West was published c. 1592, beating her by almost a century. This was another book that was hard to get into, and (though I'm not quite finished) might also be the longest book I've ever read.

When you've read double your intended goal for the year, it's twice as hard to pick a favourite. I suppose mine for 2023 was Holly by Stephen King, his most recent novel, featuring his neurotic lady detective from the Bill Hodges trilogy (Mr. Mercedes, etc.). My runner-up, collectively, was the Toradora! series of light novels by Yuyuko Takemiya. I saw the anime last year, and was so affected by it, I watched it again. The novels didn't disappoint, either—surprising since I'm hardly a romance reader.

It's a little easier to pick a least favourite when you devote an entire month to reading something other than genre fiction, which inevitably leads to some rather bleak and depressing literature. This year's "winner" was The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway, a fictionalized telling of the story of a Bosnian cellist who risked his life to play an adagio every day for each of the victims of a bombing. The problem with the book is that it wasn't really about the cellist. He was a backdrop to his own story, and it kind of left me cold. The runner-up was its immediate predecessor on my list, Rabbit, Run by John Updike. (Is there a proper literary word for a novel's main character who is just unpleasant in every possible way? "Anti-protagonist"?)

My best new discovery of the year was, A Confederacy of Dunces, the Pulitzer-winning novel by John Kennedy Toole. Again, this was one of my selections for September. Its (anti?) protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly, is an overweight, unemployed, pretentious pseudo-intellectual who lives with his mother. If Toole had written this novel in the 2020s instead of the 1960s, he'd probably be a terminally-online Redditor.

I met my goal of reading five nonfiction books this year, though no more. The topics were literary criticism, theology, and poetry. The last, in particular (Anglican poet Malcolm Guite's two books Waiting on the Word and The Word in the Wilderness) have sort of sparked my interest in poetry, and I plan to read more this year. (I didn't like poetry when I was in university, leading one of my English profs to remark once—tongue-in-cheek, hopefully—what I didn't deserve an English degree. Better late than never.)

There were two goals that I didn't meet: First, finishing the works of Stephen King. I have one book left, You Like It Darker, which I am about 2/3 of the way through. Second, completing Journey to the West. I read three of the four volumes of Anthony Yu's translation, but just ran out of time. Since my Christmas vacation is usually a good time to blitz through a few books, I would have accomplished both. How was I to know that a medical problem would keep me in the emergency room for so much of my free time? I'll finish with Stephen King soon, though, and then clear the Monkey King off my list a little later, after I've gone through my outstanding library books (why do long-time reserves always come in at once?).

Finally, my reading goals for 2024 include:

doing a new readthrough. I really enjoyed the experience of blogging my way through Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, and I plan to do a few books regularly. My plan is to start with the final two books in C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy (having already read and reviewed the first, albeit 20 years ago) and if time permits, a nonfiction book to be determined
with my Stephen King reading project coming to an end, moving on to another author: specifically, Patrick O'Brian, author of the Aubrey-Maturing series of historical fiction
continuing my habit of reading drama on Saturdays over breakfast, but instead of focusing on a particular author (i.e. Shakespeare and Behn), choose instead from a wide variety of classic plays from the Renaissance to the modern era
finish up some of the series I've started, but left hanging

Happy 2025, everyone.

And now ... this - Nov. 20/24

2024-11-20T13:31:00.004-05:00

It's a few weeks old, but it's a goodie:

A Russian court has fined Google two undecillion roubles—a two followed by 36 zeroes—for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.

In dollar terms that means the tech giant has been told to pay $20,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

[Full Story]

In comparison terms, that means that if Google paid the fine in cash, the mass of the US dollar bills would be 3.3 million times the mass of the entire earth.

Obviously, Google would pay in the largest denomination in circulation, and the stack of $100 bills would merely be 33,000 times as massive as the planet, which is far less ridiculous.

The Chronicles of Amber, chapter 14: The conclusion

2024-10-13T09:00:00.007-04:00

This is it. The final chapter of The Courts of Chaos and of the Chronicles of Amber. It's been a fun trip.

Spoiler alert: This post is part of an in-depth discussion of The Courts of Chaos by Roger Zelazny, which will inevitably reveal key plot points. You may well have a lot of reading ahead of you.

This last chapter is more of an epilogue. Random, appointed the king of Amber by the Unicorn and attuned to the Jewel of Judgment by Corwin, successfully turns away the Chaos storm. He, too, is now gone, and only Corwin and his son Merlin remain on the field of battle where Amber conquered Chaos.

Earlier, Dara accused Corwin of taking away the "two most important persons in my life." One, obviously, was Borel, her swordmaster, whom Corwin slew during the battle. I wasn't sure who the second was, but after a few chapters, it's clear she meant Merlin, who, after everyone else has retreated to the citadel of the Courts of Chaos, has elected to stay with his father rather than continue on with his mother.

As Corwin sits there, he reflects on the changes in himself and his attitudes toward his family. He gives a brief farewell to Oberon and each of his brothers and sisters. Only to Brand, the source of all their troubles, does he say nothing positive, wishing only that he would "be dead and trouble my thinking no more." To Caine, his remaining antagonist amongst his brothers, he makes a peace offer; for his sister Flora, who kept him prisoner in the hospital at the beginning of Nine Princes in Amber, he simply forgives her past wrongs.

Of himself—"the man clad in black and silver with a silver rose upon him"—he acknowledges the changes in his own character: "that he has learned something of trust, that he has washed his eyes in some clear spring, that he has polished an ideal or two." On the other hand, he also acknowledges his remaining faults: "He may still be a smart-mouthed meddler, skilled mainly in the minor art of survival, blind as ever the dungeons knew him to the finer shades of irony." And Corwin is comfortable with that. He can't measure up to his own standards. Who can?

Corwin's valedictory to Dara is curious: "Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi? No? Then good-bye to you too, Princess of Chaos. It might have been fun." At first glance, I thought this might have been another editorial oops: perhaps Carmen was the name Zelazny originally gave Dara. Pondering the similarities between Dara and the femme fatale of the Bizet opera that bears her name—both women are fiercely independent, seductive, and manipulative—I started doing a little Web research on Carmen. In doing so, I discovered that "Carmen, voulez-vous venir avec moi?" is a quotation from the Prosper Mérimée novella on which the opera is based. The same line is spoken by Humbert Humbert in Lolita. My guess is Zelazny was alluding to the latter rather than the former. Corwin had had a fling with Dara, and while he seemed unconcerned with their degree of consanguinity, he (like Humbert) was trying to transfer her trust to himself from Benedict (or so he supposed); and (unlike Humbert) he was not entirely comfortable with their difference in age: "I did not want to be in love with her. Not now. Later, perhaps. Better yet, not at all. She was all wrong for me. She was a child." (Is this why Zelazny first paired Corwin with the adult Lorraine?) And in the end, she wants nothing to do with him in any case. Kudos to Roger Zelazny for finishing off the Chronicles of Amber with a multilayered intertextual shout-out.

In the end, the Trumps have regained their function, and Random is able to contact Gérard. "Amber stands"—although years have passed there in the few days Corwin experiences from his point of view. And Corwin may have a whole new universe (multiverse?) to explore, if his own new Pattern has survived. Thus the Chronicles of Amber end on a positive note, if perhaps an unnecessarily open-ended one.

Final thoughts on The Courts of Chaos and the Chronicles of Amber

When The Courts of Chaos begins, there's little ambiguity anymore about where the battle lines are drawn. The action in this novel leads up to the inevitable, climactic battle for Amber. I could only wish the conclusion lived up to the build-up. Zelazny started well, but at the very end, I think he ran out of gas.

The majority of this book focuses on Corwin's journey from Amber to the Courts of Chaos. If the previous volumes of this series have given us plenty of examples of conflict between man and man or man and nature, here we get conflict between man and self, as Corwin contemplates his doubts about the nature of reality and his place in it. There was some discussion before about solipsism—do the Amberites create the realities they travel to, or do they discover them?—but here it takes up multiple chapters and brings additional characters into the debate.

In the earlier books of this series, I had fun chasing down Zelazny's sometimes obscure literary allusions. In the middle volumes, he either cut down on them or made them so esoteric that I passed them by without noticing. In that respect, then, The Courts of Chaos was more like Nine Princes in Amber or The Guns of Avalon. (Were the little people in their underground lair a shout-out to leprechaun lore, Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle," or something else?)

On the other hand, I note that while The Courts of Chaos tied up the numerous loose ends remaining at the end of The Hand of Oberon, nonetheless, as the final book of this series, its ending was a bit too open and vague, and left me somewhat cold. I don't think we ever did get a firm grasp on the conflict between Amber and Chaos. What was that apocalyptic battle at the end fought over, again? Sure, the villains get their comeuppance and things are set to rights, but it also feels like there was wasted potential for a sixth book in which Corwin et al have to deal with the aftermath of all the crap they put the multiverse through.

Maybe that's why Zelazny started a second Amber series seven years later. I haven't read it yet, but I will. I first read these novels around 1990, and my very general recollection was that I enjoyed them at the time but they made little impression on me. These two volumes have languished in a Rubbermaid bin in the basement ever since. One English B.A. and three decades later, I find I come away with a much more favourable impression. I'm looking forward to tackling the second cycle someday—when I can find copies.

On readthroughs

This series was a bit of an experiment. As I said way back in January, I was inspired by a readthrough of The Lord of the Rings on a book blog,¹ and was inspired to try my hand at it myself (though of course with a different book). Nine months later, was it worth it? Very much so. I reacquainted myself with some fantasy that I originally read around 1990, came away with a better impression of it now than what I recall from the first time, and wrote 57 articles on schedule (though occasionally forgetting to publish them).

Will I do it again? Again, yes! Though instead of tackling a huge book that takes most of the year, instead I want to do maybe two or three shorter works in a variety of genres: fiction, philosophy, theology. And I may ease up on the posting schedule, too. Semi-weekly wasn't too bad, but it was demanding. And unless I feel really, really strongly about something I just read, it won't be until the new year.

In other words, I'll be solidifying my this-is-not-a-book-blog credentials by posting more than ever about books.

Footnote

¹ Ceci n'est pas un footnote: I insist this is not a book blog. It's just mostly about books.

The Chronicles of Amber, chapter 13

2024-10-10T09:00:00.002-04:00

With the defeat of the Chaosians and the death of Brand, the Amberites won the day. But they lost their father Oberon, as well as their sister Dierdre and the Jewel of Judgment. Corwin collapsed and rested by the black road after Oberon's funeral procession passed. When he came to, Dara was riding past and berated him for killing her swordmaster, Borel, then left him to return to her own people. Corwin's son Merlin met him briefly, and they began to talk, but they were suddenly interrupted by the appearance of the Unicorn of Amber.

The Unicorn has the Jewel of Judgment around her neck. She gives it to Random, indicating that he has been chosen as the heir to the Amber throne. Though surprised, he accepts, and the other Amberites lay their swords at his feet.

Since Random is not attuned to the Jewel, he offers it to Corwin to hold off the Chaos storm. However, Corwin doesn't believe he has the stamina to succeed. Instead, he assists Random in attuning himself to the Jewel. He weakens and faints, but the attempt is successful, and when he comes to, tended to by Fiona, Random is holding back the storm while the rest of the Amberites retreat along the black road to the citadel of the Courts of Chaos.

Finally, only Random, Corwin, and Merlin remain. Merlin resumes his earlier conversation, wanting to hear more of Corwin's history. Corwin begins relating his story, beginning with the hospital in Albany.

Oberon's message to his children had said:

With my passing, the problem of the succession will be upon you. I had wishes in this regard, but I see now that these were futile. Therefore, I have no choice but to leave this on the horn of the Unicorn.

This is almost literally true, as the Unicorn carries the Jewel to Random on her horn.

The selection of Random as the new king is unexpected, not the least by Random himself. Oberon's "wishes in this regard" had been to put Corwin on the throne, but as Corwin's character developed, he realized he had only wanted the throne because Eric had it, and now that he didn't hate Eric any more, he abandoned the claim.

Julian is the first to offer Random his allegiance. At the beginning of the story, he was allied with Eric, and Corwin's first battle in the series pitted himself and Random against Julian and his hunting dogs in the forest of Arden. As Corwin tells Random, there do not appear to be any hard feelings.

"You have a lot of hard work ahead of you," he adds. Does he? There's little sense in these books of what the king of Amber actually does. He rules Amber, clearly. But Oberon abandoned the throne and hasn't been ruling. And there's been no sense of everyday life in Amber: by all appearances—contrasted with Chaos—it's a very static realm, hence the double meaning of the title Nine Princes in Amber. The children of Oberon spend more time staving off each other than enemies foreign and domestic, and it seems to have no appreciable effect on Amber proper.

Brand described the attunement process like this:

"There is another way to attune a person to the Jewel. It requires the assistance of someone who is already attuned. You would have to project yourself through the Jewel once more, and take me with you—into and through the primary Pattern that lies beyond."

As I interpret this, instead of using an external Pattern (like the one in Amber), someone can be attuned to the Jewel of Judgment by walking the Pattern it contains within itself. Of course, to access it, it takes someone already attuned to lead the newbie through, which Corwin and Random do successfully.

"The cause of all our troubles, Brand, was dead." That seems pretty final. I assume that means Dierdre is gone, as well, bringing the permanent deaths among the Amberites to four: Eric, Oberon, Brand, and Dierdre. Yet, somehow, the Unicorn managed to rescue the Jewel from the abyss. I wonder why she couldn't have rescued Brand or Dierdre as well.

One chapter remains of The Courts of Chaos and the original Chronicles of Amber. Hopefully I can publish that this Sunday, but it may take longer.

Science Fiction-Free September '24 wrap-up

2024-10-09T12:58:00.000-04:00

Last week I wrapped up the 2024 installment of my annual Science Fiction-Free September. I'm happy to proclaim this year's moratorium on SF novels (and, more broadly, commercial fiction) a success.

I planned for five novels, plus two extras if time remained. I completed six, plus a handful of plays by Aphra Behn and a few Japanese light novels (in English). So overall, I read 14 individual titles this September, with a number of them being short and light reading. But the main selections were anything but light! I noted last year that I'd chosen some heavy-hitting fiction, and the same is true this year.

My favourite book for the month: A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. I loved the satire of the idle, pretentious pseudo-intellectual. If Toole had written this novel in the 2020s, might he have made Ignatius a terminally online Redditor? Runner-up: Alan LeMay's The Searchers. Amos Edward's monomaniacal quest for revenge on the Comanche tribe that murdered his brother and sister-in-law and abducted their young daughter is like a Western Moby-Dick.

On the other hand, my least favourite book was Rabbit, Run, by John Updike. It's a beautifully written novel, but Rabbit Angstrom is possibly the nastiest character I've ever encountered in a book. The runner-up is The Cellist of Sarajevo, by Steven Galloway, the newest book on the list. While I can't point to a fatal fault, the story, about a handful of intertwined lives amidst the Seige of Sarajevo in the 1990s, just didn't click with me.

In the middle were Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Joseph Conrad's The Nigger of the "Narcissus"—coincidentally, the two 19th-century nautical novels. Again, there are no specific faults, but neither book was quite what I was expecting.

Of course, I owe the blog at least 250 words about each of these books, and these will be forthcoming once I wrap up the last two installments of the Amber readthrough.

I had just begun Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, my second "extra innings" novel, when the month ended. As it turns out, it's considerably longer than his previous books. I'm enjoying it, but I think I want to set it aside for a while and reset with a few more mass-market selections. Have I mentioned I'm down to the last three Stephen King novels?

The Courts of Chaos, chapter 12

2024-10-06T09:00:00.009-04:00

Using the new primal Pattern he had created before Brand stole the Jewel of Judgment, Corwin teleported himself to the battleground at the Courts of Chaos. There, Brand took Dierdre hostage as a bargaining chip to force Corwin to help him with his own plans. However, he was shot by a mysterious green-clad archer, causing him, Dierdre, and the Jewel fell into the Chaosian abyss. The archer revealed himself as Caine, who had faked his own murder to get to the bottom of the intrigue in Amber secretly. As they spoke, they were interrupted by three trumpeters on horseback emerging from the black road.

The three horsemen are the heralds of a massive procession of musicians, horsemen, dragons, and other creatures from Shadow. Finally, there is a cart draped in black, bearing a casket, and driven by Dworkin. It is Oberon's funeral cortège.

After the procession, Fiona leads Corwin away from the edge of the abyss, and he rests. He is awakened by a woman with a non-human appearance on horseback; it is Dara. She says Corwin is not the man she thought he was, and blames him for losing "the two most important persons in my life." Announcing that she is returning to her own people at the Courts of Chaos, she rides away along the black road.

When Fiona returns, Corwin complains that his life has come to nothing: after breaking out of a santitarium, fighting for Amber, and reconciling with his father and family, all of it is on the brink of destruction. After some comforting, Fiona announces that Corwin's son Merlin would like to see him. They share some wine, and they talk. Merlin believed he was going to sit on the throne of Amber, and wanted to walk its Pattern, but as Corwin tells him, Amber may no longer even exist.

The stormfront finally advances enough that it is time to retreat to the Courts of Chaos. As Corwin and Merlin rise to leave, they receive a visitor: the Unicorn of Amber.

According to Bleys, Oberon "wanted to be taken beyond the Courts of Chaos and into the final darkness when his time came at last.… Beyond Chaos and Amber, to a place where none reigned." I have this macabre image of the cortège carrying Oberon's casket to the very edge of reality, and then chucking him over the edge.

It seems this may be the last we see of Dara (or is it?). Corwin's character has developed for the better since the beginning of series, from his own point of view, but obviously Dara has a completely different impression: "You are not what I was led to believe. I had seen you as a truly noble figure—strong, yet understanding and sometimes gentle. Honorable…" Also, she says, "You have cost me two of the most important persons in my life." Assuming one is Borel, her sword teacher whom Corwin rather unceremoniously dispatched in the previous chapter, then who is the second?

"I thought of Hugi. Had I digested his flight from life as well as his flesh?" Corwin did eat Hugi. Heh. Well, he did tell him he'd eat crow…

Merlin and Corwin seem to get along all right, despite the fact that though they are father and son, they are complete strangers—;and on their first encounter, Corwin killed Merlin's friend.

The unicorn makes its third appearance in the Amber series. The first was (predictably) in Sign of the Unicorn, where it appeared to Corwin and Gérard as they retrieved the body of Caine. The second was at the end of the same novel, where the unicorn leads Corwin, Ganelon/Oberon and Random to the primal Pattern in the real Amber. The first apparition didn't have a clearly defined significance or message, except maybe to foreshadow that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in Amberite philosophy—a truth borne out by the second. So what does this sudden and last-minute third appearance of the unicorn portend? The penultimate chapter of The Courts of Chaos drops on Thursday.

RIP auto-posting

2024-10-03T16:12:00.003-04:00

Sometime after Sunday, I realized that my posts weren't automatically publishing to Twitter. After a bit of investigation, I learned that dlvr.it ended their free tier. Oddly enough, I was informed that my "trial" had ended, though I've been using the service for years.

Well, that's annoying. It's their business, of course, but one of my pet peeves is when long-established free services on the Internet start demanding money out of the blue.

And then I thought, "Wait a minute, I'm a programmer." Why can't I roll my own auto-poster? Polling the site and grabbing the title and URL for new posts is easy, so the only thing I really need to learn is how to access the X API. (And in so doing, I realized I'd inadvertently been "spamming" for several months, by posting substantially identical tweets to both my accounts. I'll be a bit more creative with the second cross-post, I promise!)

Not that the Faithful Readers will necessarily notice, but automatic posting will resume shortly. That is all.