YMMV / The Space Trilogy

• Complete Monster: "Fairy" Hardcastle. See that page for details.
• Contested Sequel: All three novels are somewhat thematically linked, while also being radically different enough from one another that it's easy to understand how audiences who liked one might not like the others as much, or even at all.
• Cult Classic: The books are certainly not as well known as Lewis' other works, but have received just as much praise from those who have read them.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • The Unman talking about the "Force" as an energy which comes from all life and commands his actions, a full thirty-plus years before Star Wars.
  • While Ransom tries to deduce which planet he's on in Out of the Silent Planet, he concludes that it isn't Venus, because he thought Venus would be a bit hotter. This was written in 1938, almost twenty-five years before the surface temperature of Venus was measured and found to be ludicrously hotter than Earth's rather than just "a bit".
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • The battle with the Unman and the Crapsack World speech by Weston in Perelandra.
  • Also in Perelandra the underground section can be incredibly creepy. Not just because most of it takes place in total darkness, but because there are lots of hints that all sorts of bizarre persons and places exist down there and the reader only sees enough of them to hint at it. And what little we see is hinted to be not necessarily evil but so foreign to human experience that it's incomprehensible.
  • The detailed description of the head and the creepy paintings in That Hideous Strength. Also Dr. Frost's POV segments.
• Older Than They Think: That Hideous Strength (and ideologically, all three books) addresses the issue of transhumanism and many of its implications. Its first printing was in 1945.
• Once Original, Now Common: At the time the trilogy was first published, most aliens in SF stories were hostile savages intent on destroying humanity. For Lewis's aliens to be morally superior to man was a radical departure (for perspective, H P Lovecraft’s entire career happened before this book)… which was widely adopted by later writers, somewhat diluting its impact today. Though the thing that remains the most original with Lewis' premise is that his aliens still believe in a deity (one who is implied to be the same one who led the Hebrews out of Egypt at that), while most other sci-fi examples don't.
• Values Dissonance:
  • The long discussions about gender roles in That Hideous Strength, as several of the protagonists try to convince the feminist Jane Studdock that a woman's place is to submit to her husband, can seem very odd to modern-day readers, especially those who don't share Lewis's traditionalist views on the subject.
  • In Out of the Silent Planet, the sinless society of Mars is built upon the assumption that certain races are naturally predisposed to certain types of work (i.e. all Hrossa are Warrior Poets, all Pfifltriggi are artistic tech geniuses and all séroni are philosophizing shepherds with no exception) in a way that eerily mirrors a Fantastic Caste System. The possibility of hnau not being happy with their lot in life is never brought up, not even by Ransom. A modern novel would probably portray this negatively or, at least, have Ransom treat it with more apprehension.
• Values Resonance: The series was condemning imperialism in the strongest possible terms long before it became chic to do so in intellectual circles:
  • Out of the Silent Planet was allegedly at least partly based in Lewis's unhappiness with how Olaf Stapledon treated the Venusians in The Last And The First Men. The alien nature of Mars's inhabitants is no reason to treat them any differently from human beings, since they're people too, let alone try to kill them to take their land or plunder their world's mineral resources. And the fact that they have a different lifestyle and culture from Earth doesn't make them "primitives" either; they're a well-developed culture that's capable of more than they're given credit for.
  • When listing examples of all that is base and ignoble in the British spirit, Dimble mentions famous imperialist Cecil Rhodes in the same breath as Oliver Cromwell and Mordred. At the time, Rhodes was often celebrated as a visionary businessman, but today he is more likely to be condemned for his virulent racism and cruel exploitation of the places he subjected to British control.

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