Good morning! May your weekend be as delightful and successful as you may wish it to be.
During a rare clean-out of my closet library, C. S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938) called my name (an eldil’s suggestion, perhaps). In honesty, I didn’t know I owned the book. For literary creatures, there is a common affliction that possesses them, where the spine of a book not yet purchased excites them in a way that those tomes already owned and shelved within one’s home do not. And that, in looking outward, we occasionally forget what we already possess. This ague from academe has been, up until a week ago, my relationship with C.S. Lewis’s exploration of science fiction’s boundlessness in Silent Planet, a story that has been on my wishlist for years while residing ten feet behind me.
What Planet is, is sublime; a work of anti-science fiction for the modern reader, at least insofar as the genre has shifted to godless machine-worship in recent years. As space exploration becomes commonplace for us, Lewis’s work is a warning against hubris. But it’s also a meditation on the cossetting embrace of the heavens — a celebration of mortality and new beginnings. Hesitant to spoil much, let me just say our protagonist, Ransom, a philologist (perhaps a nod and poke at his good friend Tolkein) and veteran of the Great War, finds himself a captive aboard a spacecraft, destination unknown.
Lewis writes in Chapter Five:
But Ransom, as time wore on, became aware of another and more spiritual cause for his progressive lightening and exultation of heart. A nightmare, long engendered in the modern mind by the mythology that follows in the wake of science, was falling off him. He had read of ‘Space’: at the back of his thinking for years had lurked the dismal fancy of the black, cold vacuity, the utter deadness, which was supposed to separate the worlds. He had not known how much it affected him till now — now that the very name ‘Space’ seemed a blasphemous libel for this empyrean ocean of radiance in which they swam. He could not call it ‘dead’; he felt life pouring into him from it every moment. How indeed should it be otherwise, since out of this ocean the worlds and all their life had come? He had thought it barren; he saw now that it was the womb of worlds, whose blazing and innumerable offspring looked down nightly even upon the Earth with so many eyes — and here, with how many more! No: Space was the wrong name. Older thinkers had been wiser when they named it simply the heavens — the heavens which declared the glory — the
‘happy climes that ly
Where day never shuts his eye
Up in the broad fields of the sky.’
He quoted Milton’s words to himself lovingly, at this time and often.
You can find the whole tale available for free here (though I strongly suggest purchasing a physical copy).
While not technically a short story, more a novella, I offer it as a book to acquire for your Christmas holiday. With a glass of eggnog or stout by your side and the Star of Bethlehem lighting your living room from atop a noble fir, the 158 pages can be processed in a trio of sittings with relative ease. Philosophic and apt, may it be a source of joy in this season of the same.