What strikes me upon reading Out of the Silent Planet is that beneath his reputation as an apologist for Christian Orthodoxy lies the beating heart of a crypto-pagan. Before I get to that, I’ll provide a brief synopsis (full spoiler alert from here on out):
Ransom, a Cambridge philologist (a linguist who studies the history of a language through texts) is walking the countryside on holiday; much like someone here in the U.S. might spend a vacation hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail. The difference being that ransom’s walking holiday is not what we call “backpacking”— carrying a tent, rudimentary cookstove, food supplies, etc, so you can create an approximation of living on your own in “the wild.” No, this is more like the old European idea of pilgrimage or travel in general— you walk until you reach the next village and hope you will find an inn to sleep in and food to eat; barring that, you might throw yourself on the mercy of strangers. Ransom finds himself walking a moor at night, having found no quarter in one village and miles to go to the next, and hoping to be offered hospitality at a country manor, he becomes entangled in the scheme of two mad scientists, Weston and Devine, the latter of whom is an old frenemy/colleague of Ransom’s.
My first thought upon reading this opening chapter was the sheer novelty of walking the countryside, stopping at someone’s house and thinking it reasonable to be offered a place to stay for the night. The novel was published in 1938— well into the modern era but, as I now realize, nearly a century ago. Already I am lamenting the lost sociability of an earlier time.
What Ransom finds, however, is not a warm welcome, Instead he is drugged and kidnapped on a mission to a strange planet. The descriptions of life aboard the spaceship fascinated me primarily as an artifact of what people speculated space travel would be like before we had any direct knowledge of space. The first artificial satellite, Sputnik, was launched by the Russians in 1957, kicking off the “space race” and the eventual landing of men on the moon in 1969. (Upon reflecting that it was the U.S. that accomplished this feat, the first thing that springs to mind is the song “America, Fuck Yeah” from the movie Team America: World Police. Apparently, the deep recesses of my psyche were indelibly shaped by a weird mashup of the Cold War rivalry of the 1980’s and the War on Terror of the 00’s).
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