LEWIS, C(live) S(taples)

(1898-1963)

   UK author and critic, born in Belfast; Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, 1925-54, and finally Professor of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge. Most of his writing, whether directly or indirectly, was Christian apologetics; this was as true of his autobiography Surprised by Joy (1955) as of the fantasy The Screwtape Letters (1942; exp vt The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast1961), in which an older devil writes letters of advice to a younger, devising various means of winning human souls. In Oxford CSL was friendly with Charles WILLIAMS (another Anglican) and J.R.R. TOLKIEN (a Roman Catholic). All three were Christian moralists with a strong interest inallegory or fantasy, and (with others) they formed a casual society, the Inklings, during whose meetings they read to each other from works inprogress.CSL's most popular fiction is for children, and is allegorical FANTASY, although it uses many sf devices, including TIME TRAVEL, otherDIMENSIONS and PARALLEL WORLDS. The kingdom of Narnia, to which various human children travel, is ruled by a lion, Aslan, who is "crucified" by a wicked witch. There are many excitingly described perils, most with a direct Christian allegorical application. Widely loved by children as straightforward fantasy, the series is: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950), Prince Caspian (1951), The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader"(1952), The Silver Chair (1953), The Horse and his Boy (1954), The Magician's Nephew (1955), which comes first in terms of the internal chronology, and The Last Battle (1956); omnibuses include Prince Caspian \& The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (omni 1990) and Tales of Narnia: The SilverChair \& The Last Battle (omni 1990). Two fantasies for adults are The Great Divorce (1945 chap), a minor allegory about Heaven and Hell, and Till We Have Faces (1956), a dark retelling of the myth of Cupid and Psyche which some of his admirers consider his best work.CSL's primary contribution to sf proper is the Cosmic Trilogy (or Ransom Trilogy) about the linguist Dr Ransom, who like Christ is at one point offered as a ransom for mankind: OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET (1938), Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus 1953), and That Hideous Strength (1945; cut 1955; cutversion vt The Tortured Planet 1958 US). The first two novels are PLANETARY ROMANCES with elements of medieval mythology. Each planet isseen as having a tutelary spirit; those of the other planets are both good and accessible, while that of Earth is fallen, twisted and not known directly by most humans. These two books are powerfully imagined, although their scientific content is intermittently absurd. The effect of lesser GRAVITY on Martian plant and animal life is rendered with great economyand vividness, as is Ransom's first sight of the water world of Venus, a rich exercise in PERCEPTION; in a passage as purely evocative of a sense of alien wonder as anything in sf, Ransom's human eyes cannot at first make sense of the strangeness about him. The religious allegory of Perelandra, however, in which an evil SCIENTIST plays Satanic tempter tothe female ruler of Venus, a new Eve, is deeply conservative and also - in its courtly, romantic (and some may think dehumanizing) view of womanhood - sexist. Lewis's ideology of gender is spelled out in detail in a numberof essays and in the critical book A Preface to Paradise Lost (1942), which can be seen as a template for Perelandra.The third volume, That Hideous Strength, is set on contemporary Earth, and is more directlyoccult in its genre machinery than either of its predecessors. The fury of CSL's attack on scientific "humanism" or "scientism" (science directedtowards purely worldly ends) is very nearly unbalanced, and leads to grossly melodramatic caricature of scientists and government-supported research units in general, and of H.G. WELLS in particular, here grotesquely envisaged as a vulgar cockney journalist, Jules. The book's attack on government indifference to ECOLOGY won it a new audience in the late 1960s. CSL's attitude towards any form of modernism was neatly encapsulated by a remark he made during a lecture on medieval poetry in 1938: "And then the Renaissance came and spoiled everything." The threebooks are collected in The Cosmic Trilogy (omni 1990).Some of CSL's minor essays in and about sf, including a transcript of a talk with Brian W. ALDISS and Kingsley AMIS, can be found in the posthumous Of Other Worlds(coll 1966) ed Walter Hooper, which includes 2 stories originally published in FSF. A later posthumous work is The Dark Tower and Other Stories (coll 1977) ed Hooper. It has been strongly suggested by KathrynLindskoog (1934-) in The C.S. Lewis Hoax (1988) that the Reverend Hooper - CSL's secretary for only one month - forged various items of posthumously published CSL material included in The Dark Tower, a charge which has been strenuously denied. Lindskoog offered a vigorous counter-rebuttal in "The Dark Scandal: Science Fiction Forgery" (1992 Quantum \#42), but in that year it was revealed that she herself had beenforging letters to do with the Hooper issue - indeed, she admitted as much, though she described her 14 forged letters as a lighthearted "prank". What there can be no doubt about is that the works assembled byHooper have affected readers as being both sexually poisonous and egregiously amateur.

   PN

   Other works: Dymer (chap 1926), a narrative fantastic poem as by Clive Hamilton; The Pilgrim's Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism (1933; rev 1943); OnStories, and Other Essays in Literature (coll 1982; vt Of This and Other Worlds 1984); Boxen: The Imaginary World of the Young C.S. Lewis (1985).As Editor: Essays Presented to Charles Williams (anth 1947), including the influential "On Fairy-Stories" by Tolkien.

   About the author: About 50 book-length studies of CSL's life and work exist, perhaps the most distinguished biography being C.S. Lewis: A Biography (1990) by A.N. Wilson. Further biographical material appear in Shadowlands: The Story ofC.S. Lewis and Joy Davidman (1985) by Brian Sibley, based on Bill Nicholson's tv drama Shadowlands, which was also a successful stage play. This was in turn filmed as Shadowlands (1993), dir Richard Attenborough, screenplay by Nicholson, with Anthony Hopkins as CSL and Debra Winger as Joy. Other studies include: Shadows of Imagination: The Fantasies of C.S.Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Charles Williams (anth 1969; exp 1979) ed Mark R. HILLEGAS, which contains an entertaining and passionate attack on CSL by the Marxist biologist and author J.B.S. HALDANE; The Longing for a Form: Essays on the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (coll 1977) ed Peter J. Schakel;The Literary Legacy of C.S. Lewis (1979) by Chad Walsh; C.S. Lewis: His Literary Achievement (1987) by C.N. MANLOVE.

   See also: ALIENS; ANTI-INTELLECTUALISM IN SF; CHILDREN'S SF; CONCEPTUAL BREAKTHROUGH; ESCHATOLOGY; FANTASTIC VOYAGES; GODS AND DEMONS; HORROR IN SF; ISLANDS; LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS; LINGUISTICS; LIVING WORLDS; The MAGAZINE OF FANTASY AND SCIENCE FICTION ; MAGIC; MAINSTREAM WRITERS OF SF; MARS; MESSIAHS; MYTHOLOGY; RELIGION; SOCIAL DARWINISM; VENUS.