Fiction books
Lewis the storyteller
"This must be a simply enormous wardrobe!" thought Lucy, going still further in and pushing the soft folds of the coats aside to make room for her. Then she noticed that there was something crunching under her feet. "I wonder is that more mothballs?" she thought, stooping down to feel it with her hand. But instead of feeling the hard, smooth wood of the floor of the wardrobe, she felt something soft and powdery and extremely cold. "This is very queer," she said, and went a step or two further.C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
Thus begins the first adventure into the land of Narnia, the setting for C.S. Lewis's most famous series of books. Although the Christian subtext to the books is an open secret among adult readers, generations of children have loved the stories without noticing the parallel between Aslan the lion and Jesus Christ.
C.S. Lewis converted to Christianity while teaching at Oxford University, but his love of books and myths had been present since his childhood. Soon after his conversion he wanted to evangelise, and it was not long before he thought of combining religious enthusiasm with imagination in his works of Christian fiction.
There is life on Mars in Out of the Silent Planet ©
The first frontier
Lewis's first Christian fiction was Out of the Silent Planet, a science fiction novel written for adults, which was the first in a trilogy.
In Out of the Silent Planet Lewis imagined a world, located on Mars, in which the Fall of humanity had never happened and the inhabitants lived without original sin. He returned to this theme in the sequel, Perelandra, which followed the temptation of the first woman on a new world, this time set on Venus.
Lewis, a professor of English literature, was also busy writing nonfiction. His first major work of criticism, The Allegory of Love, was published in 1935 and very well received. Out of the Silent Planet, two years later, attracted mixed reviews, many of which compared Lewis to H.G. Wells. More surprisingly to Lewis, out of about sixty reviews, only two seemed to notice the Christian subtext.
That prompted Lewis to write: "[I]f there was only someone with a richer talent and more leisure I think that this great ignorance might be a help to the evangelisation of England; any amount of theology can now be smuggled into people's minds under cover of romance [heroic fantasy stories] without their knowing it."
The third book in the 'Space Trilogy' is called That Hideous Strength and set on Earth. It describes and extrapolates what Lewis saw as the evil ideas in contemporary science, personified in an organisation called (with heavy irony) N.I.C.E.
All three Space books included themes from various different mythologies, but That Hideous Strength was particularly criticised because of it: Professor Chad Walsh, an American authority on Lewis, disliked the Arthurian themes in the book. George Orwell thought it would be better without any supernatural elements at all. Readers, however, enjoyed the trilogy.