Wheels Within Wheels Wednesday

[evelyn_b]

What I've Finished Reading

It was supposed to be other things, but I got sidelined by C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. Do you like science fiction, but wish it had more Renaissance cosmology and random sermons about gender? The Space Trilogy isn't really science fiction so much as a very Lewisian fantasy set in space, or, in the case of That Hideous Strength, in which space is mentioned briefly toward the end. Some of the things that happen in the Space Trilogy: a mild-mannered philologist is kidnapped by uncouth public-school scientists who try to sacrifice him to some Martians, but the Martians turn out to be a harmless crew who teach him their language and take him fishing. Later, he meets some angels. The angels send him to Venus, where he has to prevent the local Adam-and-Eve equivalents from screwing it all up again. At first he tries logic and reason, but eventually has to resort to punching the Devil to death. Meanwhile, back on earth, a bunch of diabolical progressives are ruining a sleepy college town! Only one man can stop them, and that man is the resurrected Merlin (who just happens to have been buried in the college deer park).

If you like Lewis, or if you grew up with Lewis and aren't sure how you feel about him now, you should definitely give this a read. I sometimes go back and forth about how much I like Lewis, but these books made me very fond of him, as much because of as in spite of their flaws.

What I'm Reading Now

After I finished Doorways in the Sand, I burned straight through Trumps of Doom, another book by Roger "Razzle Zelazzle" Zelazny, and began but got bogged down in Nine Princes in Amber. Trumps is steeped in the same wisecracking/hard-boiled perpetual confusion as Doorways, whereas in Nine Princes most of the confusion evaporates early on and the story settles into a kind of opaque fantasy battle plot, which I'm having trouble getting into. The two books are linked: Merle, the narrator of Trumps of Doom is the son of Corwin, the narrator of Nine Princes, and both are exiled princes of the perpetually civil-warring fantasy kingdom Amber. Amber is the real world, and Earth and all the other realms are just shadows and mirrors of Amber, which is why Amber initially appears to be made up entirely of fantasy cliches. It's a great premise, but I think like it better as a background curse on hapless concussed pseudo-detectives than I like it as a setting in its own right.

What I Plan to Read Next

Still catching up!

Comments

[osprey_archer]

The Space Trilogy is probably the one major Lewis I still haven't read (I say "probably" because he wrote SO. MANY. BOOKS). I ought to get on that! I suppose you have to approach it primed to enjoy the weirdness.

I have read that Ransome the mild-mannered philologist was based on Tolkien, who was just hopelessly puzzled about how he should feel about that.

[evelyn_b]

YOU MUST. It's weird and charming, and just a little too revealing, and just trying to picture Tolkien's reaction to Lewis' friend-insert Tolkien Sue punching out the Devil on Venus is giving me great joy right now. Ransom is an Oxford philologist who likes to take long peaceful rambles in the woods and nerds out instantly when he realizes the furry Martians are speaking a complex language; draw your own conclusions! Oh, and he gets explicitly called a Christ figure by the Venusian angels! I bet Tolkien loved that! And later he becomes the Fisher King and lies on a couch, radiantly young-old and perpetually bleeding from the wound he got while punching out the Devil. Just lying around on his couch like Oscar Wilde, communing directly with the angels and dispensing suspiciously Lewisian wisdom to his followers. Oh, Lewis. <3

(by "loved" I mean . . . probably did not love).

[osprey_archer]

I strongly suspect that Tolkien felt the whole Christ-figure thing was just a little bit blasphemous, even if he was in part responsible for Lewis's conversion and so Lewis had some reason to see him as a savior. Just... Lewis! Tone it down, man!

And later he becomes the Fisher King and lies on a couch, radiantly young-old and perpetually bleeding from the wound he got while punching out the Devil.

Ahahaha, this is beautiful. It's like a fanfic writer who really really loves a character and therefore makes that character an EPIC WOOBIE in their fic, with tragic sad (and yet also beautiful) wounds - except it's basically RPF fic about one of the author's RL best friends who was totally hearing the story read out loud every week in Inklings meetings and, one can only presume, squirming in his chair at this description of his beatific suffering and dispensing of wisdom.

And of course Lewis is just happily reading along, convinced that this is a perfectly normal loving homage and not even noticing that it might be a bit weird for Tolkien.

[evelyn_b]

<3

<3

I have nothing to add except that I love everyone in this bar.

[oracne]

When first reading the Amber books, I accidentally started with number two. It was better that way, I think.

[evelyn_b]

It might be! Trumps is maybe number 6 or so, and I couldn't put it down. Nine Princes is a little harder going, and a little duller, than I was expecting from Zelazny based on prior experience, but I guess he was finding his feet.

[landofnowhere]

(lurker, found you via osprey_archer)

I found that the Amber series really picks up around book 3 (Sign of the Unicorn), in which there is a murder mystery, and Corwin finds out that all the stuff he thought was going on in books 1 and 2 was... not the whole story. Book 2 is okay, but its first half suffers from Woman in Refrigerator.

[evelyn_b]

Welcome! Please feel free to lurk or comment as much as you like!

I finished Nine Princes and thought it picked up a little right at the end - I liked Corwin's escape from the dungeon, because it looks like a deus ex machina but has actually been perfectly adequately prepared for by the text. I don't entirely love Zelazny's habit of ending books on a cliffhanger, but that might just be my lack of familiarity with series fantasy.

Anyway, I'll probably be reading The Guns of Avalon soon. I'm not sure where exactly the Zelazny train is taking me, but for now I'm glad I got on.

[landofnowhere]

Thanks!

Interested to hear your thoughts as the series develops! The cliffhanger thing only gets worse as the series progresses, as I recall -- and it's certainly unusual for series fantasy. There's something to be said for viewing the Corwin and Merlin series each as being really a single long book published in five installments. (Starting with Corwin book 3, I read the books out of the giant 10-book omnibus, which helped.)

[liadt]

He punched the Devil to death! Bruce Willis for the film adaptation.

[evelyn_b]

I would watch it. They'd have to get him some beat-up pants for the film version, though; in the book he's naked the whole time. No clothes in paradise!

[chelseagirl]

I read and reread the Lewis trilogy in my teen years; I was also Tolkien-obsessed at the time, so generally was an Inklings fangirl, I suppose. Even then, I was bothered by the fact that *gasp* the use of birth control had prevented a prophecied child from being born, in That Hideous Strength.

[evelyn_b]

**GASP**

I love the discomfort of everyone involved when the resurrected fourth-century magician turns out to be totally hostile to twentieth-century values in a totally unhelpful way. This guy is supposed to save us in our time of need, but all he does is rant about the unnatural sorcery of the diaphragm? What the hell, man.

Lewis' attitude toward it is kind of ambiguous to me. He clearly thinks Jane is making a mistake by working on her mediocre John Donne dissertation instead of having babies, and this is connected somehow with her being the dupe of modern ideas, and everything's supposed to resolve itself in the end with procreation - but I also don't get the impression that Merlin is just a mouthpiece for Lewis' Thoughts on Birth Control. Certainly none of the present-day characters are willing to treat it like the disaster Merlin thinks it is. But I guess I don't really know enough about Lewis to know for sure.

[chelseagirl]

Hard not to think of the short story The Shoddy Lands, or the way he summarily dismisses Susan in the last Narnia book. On the other hand, his late in life wife Joy sounds like she probably would have smacked some sense into him re women's issues.

[evelyn_b]

Oh, wow, I'd almost forgotten about The Shoddy Lands! I just went and read it again to make sure I wasn't remembering it unfairly, and it turns out I wasn't remembering it unfairly enough.

"At first, I thought this total stranger was just boring and worthless, but then I walked a mile in her shoes and all my prejudices were confirmed!" Come on, buddy. :|

[chelseagirl]

It reads kind of like "girls are icky. really icky." I have not reread it in decades, but phrases still come pouring back. Bad C.S. Go play with your lion.

[thisbluespirit]

I read The Space Trilogy many years ago, and loved Out of the Silent planet, was far less keen on Perelandra (when I finally, briefly, studied Milton, I realised why I hated it, because I did not enjoy it; or at least the bit of it by a lecturer who called Lewis a neo-Christian. If Lewis had been still around, he would have beaten said lecturer hollow in a debate for that, and well deserved it would have been too.) And then I hated That Hideous Strength with a passion. I don't think I've ever hated a book so much.

Have you read Till We Have Faces? I mostly prefer Lewis's NF (as someone who came from a rather unimaginative, rigid chapel background, Lewis's allowing imagination and debate and questioning was such a huge help to me, and if I disagree with him on many things, well, he said it was fine for me to disagree with him!). Anyway, Till We Have Faces is my exception. It is a very weird book in that I like it intensely when I am reading it, and as soon as I am not, I am hard put to say exactly what happened in it and why I liked it so intensely. Every time. It was the latest of his fiction, and therefore supposed to be quite heavily influenced by his wife - maybe that is why I like it? (It is allegory, of course, but that probably goes without saying even if you haven't already read it!)

I think I would have been a lot more amused even at Perelandra and maybe even THS if I'd known he was kind of casting Tolkien as Ransome. Even back then I would have known enough to get that Tolkien would have hated it!! :lol Lewis.

[evelyn_b]

The long comment I typed out just VANISHED for no reason I can see. Long story short: I love Till We Have Faces; I think it's Lewis' best prose and best fiction, and feel the same way as you do: love it while reading, can't remember it very clearly when it's closed. Is this experience ITSELF the allegory?!? very clever Lewis, very sly <3

I definitely can't blame anyone for hating Perelandra and THS; they are 1) a damn mess, 2) somehow both all over the place and leaden with sermondumps, and 3) a tacky parade of Lewis' largely unbeautiful prejudices + Very Important Opinions on Sex and Gender. Plus all the weird Deep England / Britons v. Saxons weirdness that I don't even understand enough to dislike properly. However, I don't hate them. I like them - THS more than Perelandra, surprisingly, because I remembered it as the most whacked-out and uncomfortably revealing of them all. It is that, but it's also plottier and has at least one interesting character, arguably two.

Even back then I would have known enough to get that Tolkien would have hated it!! :lol Lewis.

I don't know why I find Lewis' difficulty in predicting what Tolkien would and would not have hated so likable, but I do. <3 Tolkien likes Jesus right? And cool old English stuff? So obviously Tolkien would love a story in which he becomes SPACE JESUS and meets Merlin! Obviously.

Oh, and! What does it mean to be a "neo-Christian"? That's not a phrase I've heard before - or if I have, I've forgotten it.

[thisbluespirit]

Aw, I am sorry for your long comment! But it is very cool that we feel the same about Till We Have Faces. (Go H/Helen/Joy, clearly. :-D)

I know at least one other person who has the same experience of it. It is very strange.

Oh, and! What does it mean to be a "neo-Christian"? That's not a phrase I've heard before - or if I have, I've forgotten it.

No, because it's a stupid phrase: neo means new (so neo-Nazis, neo-Classical), so it therefore supposes that Lewis was already living in some kind of post-Christian age where being a Christian therefore meant being a neo-Christian, as far as I can tell. Lewis would have been scathing, and I would have loved to have watched. (He wasn't the worst lecturer I havd, and I had him only briefly, but he was definitely on the young, smug and arrogant side at the time & as far as I can tell, that was a phrase meant to tell us that we needn't read what CS Lewis wrote about Paradise Lost except as a quaint curiosity, the "neo-Christian" pov.)

Plus all the weird Deep England / Britons v. Saxons weirdness that I don't even understand enough to dislike properly.

This stuff usually basically = Arthur. (The Matter of Britain - the rising of the Celts against the Anglo-Saxons, which is to say one day the welsh, Scottish, Cornish, Manx and Irish will totally get their revenge by magic dragon and/or returning King Arthur, if he wasn't made up/actually Danish/whatever. The Celts were here first, they want a belated Brexit from all the damned Angles, Jutes, Danes, Saxons & Normans who came in after and took over dammit. Then there would be bards and druids and magic, it would be great. Something like that, anyway. ;-p)

[evelyn_b]

Hold on, though, what if Arthur is a composite figure based on a Danish guy and a couple of Welsh warlords and some Bretons who got in on a transcription error and a bunch of French fanfiction? Do they all return and fight each other, do they return as a composite character, or do they have to pick straws on Avalon to see who has to sort it out this time?

I'm glad that Lewis was a help to you! And that Joy was a help to Lewis, apparently.

[thisbluespirit]

do they return as a composite character, or do they have to pick straws on Avalon to see who has to sort it out this time?

This is probably why he's still failed to reappear.

I'm glad that Lewis was a help to you! And that Joy was a help to Lewis, apparently.

I realise he seems to have been the opposite to many people, but I suppose it depends where you're coming from at the time.