Christianity and beyond

[isomeme]

I finally finished C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the final book of his "Cosmic Trilogy".  My slowness in reading this was not due to lack of interest, but rather lack of time; I have become very frustrated over the last week as I was forced to read the last hundred pages in ten- and twenty-page increments during brief pauses in the general

Comments

[tiferet]

I think what's most annoying about those books isn't the Christianity but the sexism. Babalon would have scared Lewis shitless.

[isomeme]

He seems a little less sexist to me than the norm for a 1940s British academic. He certainly sees the sexes as different, and goes out of his way to discuss how the difference between men and women is but the lower octave of a profound polarity intrinsic to Creation itself. But he also says things like (quoting from memory) "[God] is a power so masculine that we are all feminine in relation to it", which echoes certain formulae of our own tradition.

I see a lot of Babalon, including the fear you suggest, in how he portrays Perelandra in each of the last two books. Our vision of her would certainly have appalled him, but I think that it is the trappings we have placed on her, rather than her essence, which would cause the most problems.

Or perhaps I'm being too charitable. What do you see as the worst of his sexism?

[tiferet]

That whole 'you can't help us if you don't have your husband's permission' thing. I know exactly where it comes from. Without a male 'head' a woman is Perelandra Untamed.

In other words...Babalon :)

[isomeme]

SPOILER WARNING

You'll notice that while the good guys are trying to get Jane to bring Mark on board, the bad guys are trying to get Mark to bring Jane on board. It seems rather symmetrical to me. My take was that Jane misunderstood what she was being asked to do, and that, were the genders reversed, the actions (on both sides) would have been the same.

What's more, Jane was the important one of the pair; Mark was never more than a cat's-paw the bad guys used to try to get at her -- that being why (in my view) the good guys wanted him with Jane, out of harm's way.

[isomeme]

Definitely! You could either use them in order, or match the actual planets (more or less fancifully) to the characteristics Lewis gave them in his series. Note that Lewis has Venus and Mars being habitable by humans, so in a realistic system this is going to be a bit of a stretch.

You should read Out of the Silent Planet. The other two would probably not be your cup of tea, but that one is more of a "pure" adventure story, and more like normal science fiction, than the others. It's also a nice exercise in world-building, ideas from which could probably be applied elsewhere.