Book: The Cosmic Trilogy

The Cosmic Trilogy

Committed Christian C S Lewis places God at the heart of his one great science fiction foray.

Throwing a Christian beacon into the godless depths of scientific romance, C S Lewis described his Cosmic Trilogy to his friend J R R Tolkien as an antidote to perceived amorality in the genre begun by H G Wells. The three books of the trilogy are Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.

With earth condemned as the Silent Planet, cut off from the rest of the solar system, the Trilogy charts a biblical struggle between light and dark to return light to the solar system. Like Lewis's Narnia, his science fiction series sought to return a Christian ethos to imaginative literature.

A distain for scientific concepts gives the trilogy a flavour of fantasy, and it feels closer to Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings than Stapledon's Star Maker - a work Lewis hoped to critique in his trilogy.

Argument continues over whether an unpublished, unfinished work, The Dark Tower, was a continuation of the trilogy or a side project.

Work nominated by festersurfs.