Reactions and Reactionaries-Part Two

From December 2017, updated for 2026.

[Jeff VanderMeer]: Do you believe in the existence of Evil?

[Steph Swainston]: Certainly not. 'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like.

--From "Dangerous Offspring: An Interview with Steph Swainston"

by Jeff VanderMeer, Clarkesworld, October 2007.

In Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the 1980s (1983), British historian Paul Johnson set the beginning of the twentieth century in the year 1919 and a single event: the Eddington experiment, which confirmed a prediction made in Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity regarding the deflection of light caused by gravity. The late Mr. Johnson's thesis is that relativity passed from physics into other realms of thought and practice--that Einsteinian relativity became transformed into moral relativism--and thereby the central idea of the 20th century was formed. Just as there are no fixed points of reference in space-time, there are now no fixed morals, i.e., no moral absolutes. What is moral for one person might be considered immoral by another, but it doesn't matter. All viewpoints are equal. All morals are relative, or they don't exist at all, and so every kind of depravity and atrocity is permitted. To put it another way, "'Evil' is just a strong word for something you don't like."

Here is a much longer quote, a passage, from The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis (1942). It opens Chapter VII. The devil Screwtape addresses his nephew:

My dear Wormwood,

I wonder you should ask me whether it is essential to keep the patient [i.e., the human being on whom Wormwood is working] in ignorance of your own existence. That question, at least for the present phase of the struggle, has been answered for us by the High Command. Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves. Of course this has not always been so. We are really faced with a cruel dilemma. When the humans disbelieve in our existence we lose all the pleasing results of direct terrorism and we make no magicians. On the other hand, when they believe in us, we cannot make them materialists and sceptics. At least, not yet. I have great hopes that we shall learn in due time how to emotionalise and mythologise their science to such an extent that what is, in effect, a belief in us, (though not under that name) will creep in while the human mind remains closed to belief in the Enemy [i.e., God]. The "Life Force," the worship of sex, and some aspects of Psychoanalysis, may here prove useful. If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight. But in the meantime we must obey our orders. I do not think you will have much difficulty in keeping the patient in the dark. The fact that "devils" are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

In emphasis: 

Our policy, for the moment, is to conceal ourselves.

If once we can produce our perfect work--the Materialist Magician, the man, not using, but veritably worshipping, what he vaguely calls "Forces" while denying the existence of "spirits"--then the end of the war will be in sight.

If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you.

In the Preface to The Screwtape Letters, the author put things more succinctly:

There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race [i.e., the human race] can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight. 

Disbelieving in the devil--and by extension evil--as a moral, intellectual, and spiritual pitfall is older than that. In 1948, Whittaker Chambers, a former communist (i.e., a materialist and a believer in "Forces") and a convert to Christianity (i.e., a believer in God and the spirit), traced it to the previous century. In "The Devil," in Life magazine, he wrote:

Baudelaire, that old flower of evil, was right: "The Devil's cleverest wile is to make men believe that he does not exist."

Baudelaire was of course Charles Baudelaire, the French poet and a composer of weird poems. I feel certain that Baudelaire had merely put into words an age-old insight among men.

The point in all of this is that any author, including authors of the so-called "New Weird," who disbelieves in evil; who believes instead in "Forces," including History; or who operates either as a materialist or a "magician," has fallen for wiles. He or she has been duped: supposedly smart and well-educated people, falling for the oldest trick in the book.

* * *

Anything old, and for that matter anything beautiful, was always vaguely suspect.

--1984 by George Orwell (Ch. 8) 

Authors of "the New Weird" appear to be--or state outright--that they are against what they call "reactionary" authors of the past. Two or three meet their special ire: J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, and then take your pick: Robert A. Heinlein, Robert E. Howard, C.S. Lewis. (There seems to be less ire directed towards Lewis. Perhaps newer authors see him as gentle and non-threatening. But maybe he was fiercer than he appeared. I wonder what they might make of Flannery O'Connor.) Reactionary is sometimes a useful and descriptive word. But in the mouth of the radical or revolutionary leftist or Marxist, it is a pejorative, and one of the worst, though not as bad as "Nazi" or "Fascist."

To some people, I suppose, reactionary also means old. Maybe any difference doesn't matter to the person who is trying to tear down the past. After all, the goal is to start with zero. That means everything has to go onto the ash heap of History if we are to have a better and happier world. Taking away starting-at-zero as a goal, we are permitted to hold onto some things from the past. We can't get rid of Marx, after all. He's the granddaddy of all of our ideas. But just how old does something have to be before the people defending it are called "reactionary"? Rousseau is from the eighteenth century, but his ideas are considered fresh, while the younger U.S. Constitution is called outdated. We have to continue to believe in the perfectibility of man and society, as well as in the State as the expression of the general will of the people, but the rights to speak freely, to question, to dissent--these and more are problematic, if not disposable. Poverty, oppression, and political murder are as old as time, but they are to be respected under Marxism. Look at how leftists in America and their media lapdogs (or maybe it's the other way around) see Cuba right now. (I write in April. Maybe by May, Cuba will be free. May 1st would make a nice day for it. Update: It hasn't turned out that way, but it will happen soon, I think.) Meanwhile, newer and far more radical ideas--Christianity, unalienable rights, human freedom, including economic freedom--must be suppressed if not extinguished. We have to get rid of old-old things, but we have to raise up and hold on to new-old things, for example, ideas from "the New Left," policies and institutions from "the New Deal" and "the New Society," as well as the British New Wave as a model of the so-called "New Weird." The youngest of these "new" things (except for "the New Weird") is now more than sixty years old. So are many of the authors of "the New Weird."

I harp on Marxism because China Miéville, born in 1972 and one of the originators of "the New Weird," is a Marxist, necessarily a materialist. Marxism is, I think, an attempt to bring back the glory days of feudalism, before there was a middle class (the Marxist bourgeoisie) to usurp the power of the monarch (our current or aspirational State) and the aristocracy (our current élite or clerisy). Feudalism is old, old. It goes back at least to the aftermath of the fall of the Roman Empire. If it isn't literally ancient, it is very nearly so. And Marxists want it back.* Karl Marx was like a Scooby-Doo villain. His scheme would have worked--he would have been recognized as a great man, an Übermensch, and would have been able to lie around all day, doing as he pleased, lazing in luxury and wealth while Beulah peeled him a grape--if it hadn't been for those meddling bourgeoisie.

Even if feudalism is only new-old, systems and practices of political murder, oppression, impoverishment, and slavery are old-old--they go back many thousands of years. If you hate old things--if you consider yourself a progressive, radical, or revolutionary--why would you want to go back to them? Isn't that actually reactionary? Isn't the truly radical idea the Christian idea that we are free and equal because God made us so? (I remember the motto of the old Indianapolis Star: "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.") That there are moral absolutes established not by men but by God and no moral relatives at all? That the State is not an absolute authority on anything? If these things are true--if tyranny is as old as time but freedom is ever new and radical--then who again is the real reactionary? Who wants to overthrow the radical revolutions of Christianity and human freedom and return to the glorious past when the State or king was a kind of god and an aristocracy ruled over the benighted masses?

* * *

I'll close part two of this sub-series with the words of a socialist on the subject of socialists. From The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1937):

The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years' time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting. This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over en bloc from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible--the really disquieting--prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words 'Socialism' and 'Communism' draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, 'Nature Cure' quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.

And:

To this you have got to add the ugly fact that most middle-class Socialists, while theoretically pining for a class-less society, cling like glue to their miserable fragments of social prestige. I remember my sensations of horror on first attending an I.L.P. branch meeting in London. (It might have been rather different in the North, where the bourgeoisie are less thickly scattered.) Are these mingy little beasts, I thought, the champions of the working class? For every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority.

Finally:

But is it? Sometimes I look at a Socialist--the intellectual, tract-writing type of Socialist, with his pullover, his fuzzy hair, and his Marxian quotation--and wonder what the devil his motive really is. It is often difficult to believe that it is a love of anybody, especially of the working class, from whom he is of all people the furthest removed. The underlying motive of many Socialists, I believe, is simply a hypertrophied sense of order. [. . .] The truth is that, to many people calling themselves Socialists, revolution does not mean a movement of the masses with which they hope to associate themselves; it means a set of reforms which 'we', the clever ones, are going to impose upon 'them', the Lower Orders. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to regard the book-trained Socialist as a bloodless creature entirely incapable of emotion. Though seldom giving much evidence of affection for the exploited, he is perfectly capable of displaying hatred--a sort of queer, theoretical, in vacua hatred--against the exploiters. Hence the grand old Socialist sport of denouncing the bourgeoisie. It is strange how easily almost any Socialist writer can lash himself into frenzies of rage against the class to which, by birth or by adoption, he himself invariably belongs.**

Now I will observe that China Miéville is one of the bourgeoisie--he, like his mother, is a writer and a teacher--and that he is related in one way or another to British barons, so in that way he is aristocrat-adjacent. The people who edit, publish, distribute, sell, and read his books are also of the bourgeoisie. As for Jeff VanderMeer, he, too, emanates from the middle class, as does probably every other supposedly liberal, leftist, socialist, Marxist, Labour- or Democrat- or Green-oriented, progressive, radical, or revolutionary writer, editor, academic, scholar, or critic, whether of "the New Weird" or not.

Silly.

-----

*Sacrifices made to Moloch are older still. Marxists and their fellow-travelers want those back, too. Abortion and infanticide are two examples. Transgenderism is another. Whitaker Chambers began to turn away from communism when the party demanded that his wife have an abortion, for it understood that if she were to have a child, he and she both would have loyalty to something other than the party. Marxists see the family as a threat to their belief system. They want only to destroy it. Marxism is, after all, a jealous god.

**I'm glad that George Orwell was a socialist, and that he was a Briton. If he had not been a socialist, socialists would have dismissed him as a reactionary. If he were alive today, they would cancel him, just as people on the left have tried to cancel J.K. Rowling, who is no conservative at all except that she understands that a man can't be a woman. And Britain needs Orwell more than we do. He can speak to the people of the United Kingdom as one of their countrymen. If he had been an American, they would easily have shut him out. They need to hear him, though, and heed the warnings that he provided them in his writings, especially in 1984 (1949), which was, as we know, not intended as an instruction book.

By the way, earlier this year a British video game character named Amelia escaped from her creators to become a tempter of young men away from the State that wants to prevail over them. (If the society created by the overarching and controlling state is Eden, then let there be no Eve.) In that way, Amelia plays the same role as Julia in 1984, LUH 3417 in THX 1138 (1971), and I-330 in We (1924). There have since become German, Dutch, and other versions of Amelia. I wish them all success, even if they have faded from the news. (Stay tuned for more on Amelia, as well as Joy Division and Starship Troopers.)

A Signet edition of 1984 by George Orwell, with cover art by Alan Harmon.

Original text copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley

C.S. Lewis on Science Fiction

On Tuesday, September 27, 2022, I made an entry called "Fantasy Against the Machine." I began with this sentence:

If you're looking for an example of the antipathy that fantasy might have towards science fiction, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) would be a place to start.

I base that on ideas and themes from Lewis' Space Trilogy, especially That Hideous Strength, but also Perelandra (1943) and this passage:

He [Weston] was a man obsessed with the idea which is at this moment circulating all over our planet in obscure works of "scientifiction," in little Interplanetary Societies and Rocketry Clubs, and between the covers of monstrous magazines, ignored or mocked by the intellectuals, but ready, if ever the power is put into its hands, to open a new chapter of misery for the universe. It is the idea that humanity, having now sufficiently corrupted the planet where it arose, must at all costs contrive to seed itself over a larger area: that the vast astronomical distances which are God's quarantine regulations, must somehow be overcome. This for a start. But beyond this lies the sweet poison of the false infinite--the wild dream that planet after planet, system after system, in the end galaxy after galaxy, can be forced to sustain, everywhere and for ever, the sort of life which is contained in the loins of our own species--a dream begotten by the hatred of death upon the fear of true immortality, fondled in secret by thousands of ignorant men and hundreds who are not ignorant. (Chapter 6)

Perelandra is the second book in the trilogy and my favorite. The first is Out of the Silent Planet (1938). The silent planet of the title is Earth. It's called that because Earth, its people being "bent," is under quarantine so that we may not spread our fallen condition among the stars.

In That Hideous Strength, Lewis pretty well skewered H.G. Wells by casting him as a comical character and a stooge for the plans and schemes of some truly rotten people, the kind of people who actually exist in real life and are now at the heads of government and industry throughout the Western world. (You could say that the communists in China are a pretty mild threat compared to them.) Lewis set all of this up despite his note at the beginning of Out of the Silent Planet:

Note: Certain slighting references to earlier stories of this type which will be found in the following pages have been put there for purely dramatic purposes. The author would be sorry if any reader supposed he was too stupid to have enjoyed Mr. H.G. Wells's fantasies or too ungrateful to acknowledge his debt to them.

In any case, I have a feeling that Lewis wrote his Space Trilogy, in part, as a response to a distinctly Wellsian brand of science fiction, perhaps especially to ideas expressed in the film Things to Come (1936), which ends, of course, with a scene in which the people of Earth, in all of our pride and ambition and grand plans, attempt to break out of what Lewis called "God's quarantine."

Some people consider the Space Trilogy to be works of science fiction. I'm not so sure of that. I like a tighter definition of the term. I might call it instead space fantasy or science fantasy. In some ways, it has more in common with weird fiction than it does with science fiction. The resurrection of Merlin in That Hideous Strength is an example of a weird-fictional versus a science-fictional event. Over all, there is an emphasis on the spiritual and supernatural rather than on the material and scientific. It's worth noting that Lewis subtitled this last book in his trilogy "A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups."

On September 29, 2022, reader Carrington Dixon left a comment on my entry "Fantasy Against the Machine":

I think it is a bit of a stretch to say that Lewis "had some antipathy towards science fiction," just because he makes Wells one of the villains of That Hideous Strength. After all, several of Lewis' works are generally considered to be science fiction. To get a better understanding of how Lewis regarded science fiction you might read his essay, "On Science Fiction." I have it in the book Of Other Worlds; it may be available in other collections. I should say that generally he liked sf; although, he liked some kinds more than others.

Lewis admitted in his introductory note that he enjoyed Wells' fantasies and owed them a debt. I imagine that he read other fantasies--i.e., stories of science fiction--and enjoyed them, too. And so I read his essay "On Science Fiction," as Mr. Dixon recommended, and I find that Lewis did indeed read and enjoy some science fiction, but he seems to have included that genre (or those genres) in a wider category of all kinds of fantasy fiction. He also broke science fiction down into several types, what he called "sub-species," and examined them one by one. It's all really interesting but entirely too short. I wish that Lewis had brought his wide reading and erudition to bear and had written at length on the topic. But we have what we have from him instead and will have to be satisfied with that. In any case, it's clear that Lewis liked some of his sub-species and did not like others. I would like to thank Carrington Dixon for his comment and his recommendation.

So, I guess what I should have written is that C.S. Lewis seems to have had some antipathy towards the science-fictional idea of progress, also to a hard-scientific or materialist approach to the subject matter of science fiction. But then he was skeptical of the real-world idea of progress anyway, perhaps more accurately, antipathetic towards the efforts of the progressives and materialists among us. Maybe what he was looking for more than anything in his reading is a moral, spiritual, or human dimension in fantasy and science fiction.

In his essay, Lewis wrote: "Far the best of the American magazines bears the significant title Fantasy and Science Fiction." Presumably he was referring to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which began seventy-three years ago this month under the editorship of Anthony Boucher (a fellow Christian) and J. Francis McComas. (The occasion was the 100-year anniversary of the death of Edgar Allan Poe.) In regards to that magazine and the kinds of stories it published, Lewis wrote:

In it (as also in many other publications of the same type) you will find not only stories about space-travel but stories about gods, ghosts, ghouls, demons, fairies, monsters, etc. This gives us our due. The last sub-species of science fiction represents simply an imaginative impulse as old as the human race working under the special conditions of our own time. It is not difficult to see why those who wish to visit strange regions in search of such beauty, awe, or terror as the actual world does not supply have increasingly been driven to other planets or other stars. It is the result of increasing geographical knowledge. The less known the real world is, the more plausibly your marvels can be located near at hand. As the area of knowledge spreads, you need to go further afield: like a man moving his house further and further out into the country as the new building estates catch him up. [. . .]

     In this kind of story the pseudo-scientific apparatus is to be taken simply as a 'machine' in the sense which that word bore for the Neo-Classical critics. The most superficial appearance of plausibility--the merest sop to our critical intellect--will do. I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best. I took a hero once to Mars in a space-ship, but when I knew better I had angels convey him to Venus. [These things happened of course in his Space Trilogy.] Nor need the strange worlds, when we get there, be at all strictly tied to scientific probabilities. It is their wonder, or beauty, or suggestiveness that matter. When I myself put canals on Mars I believe I already knew that better telescopes had dissipated that old optical delusion. The point was that they were part of the Martian myth as it already existed in the common mind.

It seems clear to me that Lewis was writing here about what we would call the Lost Worlds type of story and its extensions (which go into outer space), perhaps more broadly science fantasy and not strictly science fiction. And he mentioned H. Rider Haggard in his discussion (though not in the parts I have quoted above). Significantly, in beginning this part of "On Science Fiction," Lewis wrote: "I turn at last to that sub-species in which alone I myself am greatly interested." And I will emphasize the line:

I am inclined to think that frankly supernatural methods are best.

* * *

By the way, in his discussion of what he called the Eschatological sub-species of science fiction--for example Wells' Time Machine, Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men, and Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End--Lewis used the F-word. He wrote:

Stories of this kind may explain the hardly disguised political rancor which I thought I detected in one article on science fiction. The insinuation was that those who read or wrote it were probably Fascists.

And:

The charge of Fascism is, to be sure, mere mud-flinging. Fascists, as well as Communists, are jailers; both would assure us that the proper study of prisoners is prison. But there is perhaps this truth behind it: that those who brood much on the remote past or future, or stare long at the night sky, are less likely than others to be ardent or orthodox partisans.

So that flinging around of the word and charge of "Fascist!" and "Fascism!" is old, old. I should add that it usually comes from people who supposedly look to the future, not the past, and want new things, if there can indeed be anything new under the sun. Maybe that's why some people read and write science fiction: to get out from under the sun, to go beyond the sun into new things.

* * *

Thanks again to Carrington Dixon for reading and writing, also for his recommendation. Thanks also to everyone who reads and finds interest in this blog. I hope to continue it for a long time to come, and I hope you will stay with me as I go.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

Fantasy Against the Machine

If you're looking for an example of the antipathy that fantasy might have towards science fiction, That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis (1945) would be a place to start. One of the basic ideas in this blog is that, being about the past, fantasy and weird fiction (other genres, too) tend towards conservatism. Science fiction is of course about the future and tends to be progressive. That's not a perfect formulation. There is conservative science fiction and progressive fantasy and weird fiction. That Hideous Strength in particular, though, is fantasy rather than science fiction and conservative rather than progressive. The author's opposite--a figure he pretty effectively skewers in That Hideous Strength--is H.G. Wells, a father of science fiction in Britain.

My formulation is useful in its way, but it goes only so far. As always, we should take things as they are and not try to theorize too much, label too much, categorize too much, least of all intellectualize too much. Too many of the horrors of the past century have come from intellectualized systems and from the desire to turn things and people into collectives and categories rather than to recognize and accept them as individuals. Marxism, for example, is a progressive intellectual system that seeks to collectivize, that is, to render individual people into masses. It's a crime and an injustice to murder one person. Masses, though, can be slaughtered without hesitation or compunction.

There were other mass movements that worked their horrors during the twentieth century. Nazism and fascism were two. The facile mind calls them far-right or rightwing, less often conservative. Another imperfect formulation. Nazism and fascism were, I think, more complicated than any of that, certainly irrational and hard to describe. They were backward-looking in their way, but they were also progressive, collectivist, and socialist. We should always remember that: nazism and fascism were socialistic systems. Mussolini was a dyed-in-the-wool socialist. The Nazis had the word socialism in their very name. I'm not sure that these two groups tried to hang their hats on an intellectualized idea like Marxism did. There was a pretty large dose of irrationalism and romanticism in them, especially in nazism, I think. In contrast, the Marxists liked to pass off their system as strictly scientific, never mind such antiscientific ideas as Lysenkoism. Marxists understood then and understand now that if it's scientific, it is, in our modern age, held to be undeniable and indisputable. We have with us now the pejoratives "anti-science" and "science denier," a term that I believe is meant to invoke the far more pernicious idea--a neo-nazi idea, I guess--of being a Holocaust denier. If you question The Science™ you're basically a Nazi, you Nazi, so don't do it. We should remember that Nazis especially had their own brands of pseudoscience, including racial "science." On the other hand, they also came up with real-life, hard-science gadgets such as jet engines, guided missiles, and rockets, in other words, the stuff of science fiction.

I'm writing about this now because of a real-world development of which I was totally unaware until I read about the Italian elections taking place today. (I write on Sunday, September 25, 2022.) The expected winner of the premiership is Giorgia Meloni. (She will make the second female conservative or supposed conservative to take control of a European government this month.) It's probably not too strong to say that progressives hate her. They probably also fear her. (The hate may come from the fear.) They call her far-right and say she's a fascist. I don't know the ins and outs of these things. Good luck trying to understand the intricacies of Italian politics--unless you're Italian. Politics seems to be one of their national hobbies--there is no word for "hobby" in the Italian language--passions, obsessions, and pastimes all rolled into one. It's no coincidence, by the way, that manifesto is an Italian word. They turn to us for hobbies, we to them for manifesti. Anyway, I find that Signora Meloni is a fan of fantasy, especially J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. In fact, she considers the books "a sacred text." (1) And she attended at least one of Italy's Hobbit Camps (Campo Hobbit), an institution I had never heard of until today. Things are getting interesting.

So--or allora because we're talking about Italy--if you read about Giorgia Meloni and Hobbit Camps, you are likely to see the words "fascist" and "far-right" over and over again. (See if you can get someone to give you a nickel every time you read them.) For example, here is a link to an article called "How 'Hobbit Camps' Rebirthed Italian Fascism" by John Last, from the website Atlas Obscura, dated October 3, 2017. It's an interesting article, even if it seems meant to scare you. (There is talk about people dressed like the fascists of old, yet all of the pictures in the article are of typical non-scary 1970s people. The flags are a little worrying, though.) There are also attempts to tie Tolkien to fascism and fascist ideas. But then that's a standard tactic for progressives, who seem to fall back on their own faulty formulation, that everything they don't like is fascist. Just look at our current president, John Gill, who has stopped short of calling half of his fellow Americans fully fascist by his use of just two syllables, sem- and -i-, this while standing in front of a lurid, blood-red background, flanked by two faceless members of his military, while shouting and shaking his fists in anger. (2) Sometimes irony can be pretty ironic. (3)

And now I wonder if any government, political party, or political movement has ever been based on a work of science fiction or a science-fictional idea . . .

Anyway again, we should be wary of writers and journalists who let their own ideas about things distort their writing and reporting. If you have already drawn the conclusion that Giorgia Meloni and Hobbit Camps are fascist, then every bit of evidence that you find can only confirm that conclusion. There is no longer any room for balance or straight presentations of fact. Maybe she is and maybe she isn't. Maybe they are and maybe they aren't. But write about those questions. Look for those answers. Don't tell us what you think. We don't really care what you think. And especially don't tell us what to think. Given the facts, we're smart enough to draw our own conclusions.

To get back to C.S. Lewis (remember him from the beginning of this essay?), well, he and Tolkien were friends. Both were Christians. Both were conservative. Both were authors of fantasy. Both were more or less traditionalist and anti-modernist. One at least had some antipathy towards science fiction, especially a prominent author of science fiction, H.G. Wells. Do we know anything about how Tolkien felt about science fiction?

Allora, finally, we have a literary work of the twentieth century, written by a Catholic and culturally conservative author, which has been embraced by what may actually be a pagan political movement. (Remember, believers in Christ hold up a different book as their lone "sacred text.") That political movement may or may not be rightwing or fascist, meaning it may or may not be some possible weird combination of progressive and conservative; working class and middle class; backward-looking and forward-looking; irrational, romantic, and pseudoscientific; and so on. It may or may not hold certain cultural and historical or pseudo-historical ideas that may or may not be diagnostic of fascism. But it's about to take the reins of power in Italy. I have a feeling that it's not fascist and not scary after all. But we're supposed to believe that it is because people who adhere to the other side--a side responsible for its own myriads of atrocities during the last century--tells us to believe that. It's all so convoluted that you could write a book--maybe a long trilogy complete with maps and songs--about it and maybe still not wear out all of the possibilities. And all of this follows the birth week of both Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. What an interesting world we live in!

Notes
(1) According to Jason Horowitz in his article "Hobbits and the Hard Right: How Fantasy Inspires Italy's Potential New Leader," in the New York Times, September 21, 2022.
(2) John Gill, of course, is a character from Star Trek, which has also been called fascist.
(3) Here is a link to another article, "Of Hobbits and Tigers: The Unlikely Heroes of Italy's Radical Right" by Tobias Hof on the website Fair Observer, December 23, 2020.

"Faramir," an episode from the Hildebrandt Brothers' J.R.R. Tolkien calendar for June 1977, the month during which the first Hobbit Camp was held in Italy and just six months after Giorgia Meloni was born. Sorry for the digital watermark. I guess some numbskull on the Internet believes that he owns this image just because he digitized it. These things are like a dog peeing on a fire hydrant and calling it his.

Update (Sept. 27, 2022): The news is now that Giorgia Meloni will in fact be prime minister of Italy. She will be the first woman to hold that position. I think that's supposed to make her "historic," but good luck hearing anything about that in the mainstream media. Instead, the drumbeat message of the past couple of days is that she's a fascist. That will go on I'm sure. I have seen a few videos of Signora Meloni speaking in that time. Now I know why the left hates and fears her so much, for she stands firmly and fiercely against their organizing principle, which is that there shall be nothing to intervene between the individual and the State, and now, in the twenty-first century, all of the State's associated corporate and transnational bodies. Let's remember Mussolini's words, which are in contrast to Signora Meloni's: "Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State."

In the videos I have seen, Signora Meloni speaks for faith and family and against the State, for her own nation and people and against internationalism, transnationalism, and globalism, for the things that make us individual, spiritual, and human and against corporatism, consumerism, and materialism. It's worth noting that her opposite, Ursula von der Leyen, German of course, now speaks with all arrogance of "the tools" by which Signora Meloni will be made to heel and the Italian people presumably punished for choosing her. It was a democratic election but with an undesired outcome, and so the media howl and Frau von der Leyen and people like her scheme and plan against it.

In seeing the video of Ursula von der Leyen, I remember two things: First, I remember something that my Italian friend told me, that in World War II, the Nazis did not want to let go of Italy, that they treasured it more than any other place they had conquered. You can ask Italians now how Germans in their country conduct themselves and how they see and treat bell'Italia and her people. Second, I remember the film Roma città aperta (1945) in which the Italian people are shown as being for life, family, children, and humanity. They are full of hope and strive to be free. In contrast, their Nazi occupiers are sterile, perverted, oppressive, despairing, and anti-human, seeking only "morden, morden, morden!" Those are the unforgettable words of Captain Hartmann, who also says, "We Germans refuse to realize that people want to be free."*

We'll see how things go. One thing I know for sure is that we--humanity--will live and be free. Those arrayed against us can only perish along with all of their grand ideas, which are built of course upon foundations of slime.

-----

*Another imperfect formulation: Giorgia Meloni as the Italian Pina (played by Anna Magnani) versus Ursula von der Leyen as the German Nazi Ingrid (dubbed by Roswita Schmidt). Maybe we can work Klaus Schwab into that formulation somehow.

Original text copyright 2022 Terence E. Hanley

The Queen and the Professor

As I write, the funeral cortege for Queen Elizabeth II is about to enter Windsor Castle. She will be interred this afternoon. So her seventy years' reign reaches its end and we are severed again from the historical past. This pleases some people, who want to destroy the past, all custom, and all tradition. They are people who essentially seek to overthrow reality and to usher in something they believe to be new. They believe, I think, that they can create something new, that reality--the universe and all of its laws and underpinnings, all of nature, including human nature, more things still--is both flawed and alterable. This is the progressive program, I think, and it rages against conservatism. Progressivism is in more than one heir to the queen's throne. I hope that they may draw back once they realize that the time for playing games is behind them. I think the survival of their nation is at stake. I'm an American and farther back than that Irish, but if we are forced to choose between mooring ourselves to the verities and certainties of the past and unmooring ourselves from those things and casting ourselves into storms of chaos, then I think we have to choose the safe harbors of the past. Life and living depend on it.

C.S. Lewis wrote about progressivism. In The Screwtape Letters (1942), in the voice of the demon Screwtape, he wrote:

     But the greatest triumph of all is to elevate this horror of the Same Old Thing into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect may reinforce corruption in the will. It is here that the general Evolutionary or Historical character of modern European thought (partly our work) comes in so useful. The Enemy [i.e., God] loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking "Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant questions. [. . .] And great work has already been done. Once they knew that some changes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent. We have largely removed this knowledge. For the descriptive adjective "unchanged" we have substituted the emotional adjective "stagnant." We have trained them to think of the Future as a promised land which favoured heroes attain--not as something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is[.] [Emphasis added.]

In That Hideous Strength (1945), Lewis created among other things an organization called the National Institute for Co-ordinated Experiments, or N.I.C.E. The aims of N.I.C.E. can only be called progressive: they seek to overthrow the past, transcend their bodies, and make of themselves as gods. They are of course defeated, as any rebellion against reality must be.

This summer I read an article called "Lockdown and the Price of Suppressing Dissent" on the website Spiked (Aug. 26, 2022). The author is Fraser Myers. In his article, Mr. Myers mentions another organization, this one apparently real. It's called SAGE, for Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies. According to Mr. Myers, SAGE's "unelected advisers were effectively 'empowered' to set policy during the pandemic, with little pushback from the government." As soon as I saw that acronym, my thoughts went immediately to That Hideous Strength. Again, there is predictive power in the conservative imagination.

Queen Elizabeth herself was subject to the COVID regime. Imagine: she was the queen and yet not sovereign in her own nation. At her husband's funeral, she was forced to sit alone in church. Meanwhile, her prime minister and all of his corrupt and morally decadent cronies partied on. The queen lived long enough to see him out of office, though, and to approve his successor. It was her last official act in fact. There may be some satisfaction in that. Like I wrote before, we can only hope that that new boss, who I believe is seated right now in the funeral chapel, will not be the same as the old boss, and that she will do something--anything--to banish even the smallest part of progressivism from her government and its policies.

I have been to so many funerals these past few years. Maybe you have been, too. It's hard to watch another one. It's hard to fall away from the past again. But there are still steadfast and imperishable things. We can still hold on to them. The priests have called the queen a "most excellent" monarch. That she was. I don't think we'll see her like again.

Original text copyright 2022, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

Summer Reading List No. 9-The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Moon Maid by Edgar Rice Burroughs was first published as a five-part serial in Argosy All-Story Weekly, from May 5 to June 2, 1923. I have the Ace paperback edition from 1962 with cover art by Roy G. Krenkel. Krenkel's illustration is essentially a reworked version of an earlier illustration by J. Allen St. John, who did so many covers for Weird Tales. That's nothing at all against Roy Krenkel. He was just doing what editor Donald A. Wolheim wanted him to do. (1) We'll hear a little more about J. Allen St. John in the next part of this series.

* * *

As it turned out, The Moon Maid was the first of a trilogy that included a part two, The Moon Men, and a part three, The Red Hawk. All three parts have been published together as an omnibus edition with the all-inclusive title The Moon Maid. To make things more confusing, The Moon Maid is actually a prequel--a kind of back-construction--to The Moon Men, which was written first and in a different form. The Red Hawk is a short sequel to The Moon Men. Ace Books put out a combined printing of parts two and three in 1963. I'll cover that one book and its two parts in the next two installments in this series. Then there will be one more Moon book before I get back to my series on Utopia and Dystopia in Weird Tales. I've been working on that series for ten months now, which is way too long. I might reach a year by the time I'm finished with it.

* * *

I could write a lot more about The Moon Maid than what you'll read here, but I'd better not. I'd better stick to the subject, which is Utopia/Lost Worlds versus Dystopia, eventually as they appeared in Weird Tales. That "Dystopia" needs a second part, though.

The first part of my thesis is that Utopia made its way into Weird Tales by way of the Lost Worlds-type story. I'll let you know now that the second part of my thesis is that the Alien Invasion-type story can be seen as the popular equivalent of Dystopia, just as Lost Worlds is a popular equivalent of Utopia. (There is reason to think that Utopia is actually a kind of Lost Worlds story rather than the other way around. In other words, whether it came first or second, Utopia was subsumed at some point by Lost Worlds, especially after Lost Worlds became a staple of science fiction and fantasy, and especially as the Lost Worlds story was cast into the future or into the past.) As I have already written, Utopia and Dystopia seem to me high, refined literary genres. They are taught in literature classes and are the subject of scholarly research. They may work better in academia than in popular (or subliterary) forms, such as popular magazines, pulp magazines, mass-market paperbacks, comic books, and movies. Maybe it's through Lost Worlds that Utopia found its way into the pulps. Likewise, Alien Invasions might represent Dystopia in those same pulpy pages. Taken together, Lost Worlds and Alien Invasions make up a really large percentage of science fiction and fantasy stories. I'll have more on all of that as I finish off my previous/current series.

* * *

Burroughs cast The Moon Maid into what was then the future. It begins on Mars Day--June 10, 1967. A half-century of war has come to an end and the world is relieved and overjoyed. (2) The story begins on board a transoceanic airship called the Harding. (3) It begins, too, with a framing device, a needless framing device, I might add, except that Burroughs had to figure out how to write The Moon Maid as a setup for The Moon Men, which is the true and original center of his Moon trilogy (and not just because it's part two). His solution was to create a series of characters who live through the centuries as reincarnations of a man named Julian. So we have to let the framing device slide. The Moon Maid is also a club story, recounted by Julian 5th in the Blue Room of the airship Harding on its way from Chicago to Paris. 

It's called Mars Day because it's the day that Earth has established contact with Mars, John Carter's Barsoom in fact. That makes the Moon trilogy peripheral to Burroughs' Mars novels. Well, why not? If you've made one success, why not try for another by hanging the second onto the first? Anyway, there is a detailed account in The Moon Maid of how men of Earth make radio contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence. I'm reminded of James E. Gunn's book The Listeners, about which I wrote not very long ago. I wonder if this was one of the first instances of such contact in American science fiction, or science fantasy, which is a better term, I think, for Burroughs' work.

Julian 5th is from the future and so remembers things that haven't happened yet. One of them is the establishment of the International Peace Fleet, "which patrolled and policed the world." Here, then, is an even more striking parallel than with James E. Gunn's book, this time with the film version of Things To Come by H.G. Wells (1936). In both are decades of disastrous war. Then comes an air fleet designed to police the world, to make peace, to keep the peace. In both, power comes from above: the all-seeing eye of the superior and altruistic airman looks down upon the Earth's surface, helping to ensure that no evil is done by men. In one, tyranny is imposed by those airmen, specifically their leader, Cabal (who wants to conquer the Moon by the way). In the other, tyranny comes from without by way of an alien invasion. I will add that sometimes men of Earth are the aliens and the invaders.

* * *

Julian 5th tells of how a crew of Earthmen leave on board a rocketship to Mars. One of the crew, named Orthis, is twisted inside. (Ironically, ortho- denotes something straight.) By his actions, the rocketship, called The Barsoom, is forced to land on the Moon, which proves to be a Lost World. As in so many Lost Worlds stories, there are anthropological or ethnological descriptions of peoples, cultures, languages, customs, and so on. And as in so many--if not every--Burroughs story, there is a maid, here the Moon Maid, who needs rescuing. Maids or damsels are always in distress. They are always getting themselves kidnapped and threatened, often with marriage to unwanted suitors. That's an old story. But I wonder if George Lucas could have gotten his Princess Leia from Burroughs' many maids, damsels, and princesses in need of rescuing. (4) The Moon Maid is also like a Ruritanian romance, which is simply a Lost Worlds story set in modern Europe.

* * *

Orthis reminds me of Weston, the villain in C.S. Lewis' Space Trilogy. In Lewis' first book, Out of the Silent Planet (1938), Weston seeks to conquer Mars as a first step towards conquering other planets, "planet after planet, system after system, till our posterity--whatever strange form and yet unguessed mentality they have assumed--dwell in the universe wherever that universe is habitable." (Weston and Cabal also have their similarities.) In Perelandra (1943), Weston hopes to bring about a fall from grace among the newly made people of Venus. If Eden or Paradise is God's Utopia, then Weston's goal in Perelandra can be seen as anti-utopian, in other words, perhaps, dystopian. (Weston is the alien invader on both Mars and Venus.) In That Hideous Strength (1945), the final installment of Lewis' trilogy, the threat is in fact dystopian. But that new Dystopia to be established on Earth doesn't come by way of an alien invasion. Instead it is homemade: it comes from Earth, for the men of Earth are "bent" (vs. straight, or orthic, my new word), thus the status of our world as a cosmically quarantined or "silent" planet in Lewis' trilogy. I'm reminded of a quip from Immanuel Kant: "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

* * *

It's worth noting that Burroughs wrote first and Lewis came after. It's also worth noting that Lewis' gripe was against Wellsian science fiction rather than with fantasy or science fantasy. Lewis once read Burroughs and "disliked it," he wrote. Lewis didn't go out of his way to poke fun at Burroughs, though, maybe because Burroughs was an American pulpwriter rather than a British man of letters. Burroughs was low; Wells was high. More to the point, Wells was an unbeliever, an advocate of science and maybe even Scientism, a socialist, almost certainly a materialist, possibly a believer in what we should all know by now is the specious idea of Progress. (Jack Williamson had a different opinion about Wells and Progress.) In other words, Wells believed in many things that were anathema to C.S. Lewis in his maturity. The two were in natural opposition to each other.

* * *

Like Weston, Orthis travels between worlds seeking to conquer them, corrupt them, ultimately to overthrow them or tear them down. He has his sights set first on the Moon Maid's people, then on Earth itself. In The Moon Maid, Orthis enlists the aid of other Moon Men and he leads them to victory. Those men--the same Moon Men of the second of Burroughs' trilogy--are called Kalkars. They are destroyers of civilization and of "the old order." (p. 89) They were to have been Bolsheviks or communists in Burroughs' original version of The Moon Men. In reworking that story, he turned them into aliens who eventually invade and subdue Earth.

The Moon Maid, Nah-ee-lah says of the Kalkars:

"They will make slaves of us [. . .] and we shall spend the balance of our lives working almost continuously until we drop with fatigue under the cruelest of taskmasters, for the Kalkars hate us of Laythe and will hesitate at nothing that will humiliate or injure us." (p. 109)

I don't know about you, but to me they sound like socialists. I'm sure that was Burroughs' intent.

A fellow prisoner explains to Julian 5th the origins of the Kalkars:

"The Kalkars derive their name from a corruption of a word meaning The Thinkers. [. . .] (5) There is a saying among us that 'no learning is better than a little,' and I can well believe this true when I consider the history of my world, where, as the masses became a little educated, there developed among them a small coterie that commenced to find fault with everyone who had achieved greater learning or greater power than they. Finally, they organized themselves into a secret society called The Thinkers, but known more accurately to the rest of Van-ah [i.e., the Moon] as those who thought that they thought. It is a long story [. . .] but the result was that [. . .] The Thinkers, who did more talking than thinking, filled the people with dissatisfaction, until at last they arose and took over the government and commerce of the entire world. [. . .] The Thinkers would not work, and the result was that both government and commerce fell into rapid decay." (pp. 120-121)

Stupid, poorly educated, ignorant, illiterate. Pseudo-intellectual, full of talk, lazy, destructive, incompetent. Hateful, envious, always seeking to enslave, hurt, and humiliate those who oppose them: Yeah, they're socialists.

In the historical past, the Kalkars tore everything down and destroyed all books and written records. They lack intellectual powers and are ignorant of science and technology. Although they themselves are not numbered, their cities are, for example City No. 337: Burroughs foresaw the dehumanization that is part of the socialist program. (6) Unfortunately, the Kalkars succeed in taking over the Moon, and The Moon Maid ends like The Empire Strikes Back: abruptly, without a clear resolution, and with some dissatisfaction on the part of the reader. Like I said, the first book was meant to set up the second. Readers had to wait a couple of years to find out what happens next.

* * *

I finished reading The Moon Maid on August 30. On that day, the Kalkars took Laythe and the Taliban took Afghanistan.

To be continued . . .

Notes
(1) See the interview with Roy Krenkel in The Edgar Rice Burroughs Library of Illustration, Volume Three (Russ Cochran, 1984), specifically page 112.
(2) In the real world there was also an end to war on June 10, 1967. This one--the Six-Day War--was on the opposite end of duration to the half-century in The Moon Maid. In it, Israel proved victorious and Jerusalem was liberated, we hope forever.
(3) Warren G. Harding was president when The Moon Maid first went to print. He died two months to the day after the last installment appeared.
(4) There are similarities in the names of planets, too: Barsoom and Jasoom. Tatooine and Dantooine. And with C.S. Lewis: Malacandra, Thulcandra, Perelandra.
(5) Kalkar is a homophone for calcar, meaning "spur." Burroughs was a horseman. Maybe his name for his Moon Men was meant to evoke the imagery of men who ride other men or put the spurs to other men.
(6) 337 is a prime number by the way. Significance? Some or none?

Original text copyright 2021, 2023 Terence E. Hanley

From Things To Come into The Space Trilogy-Part Five

There are now more parts to this series than there are to The Space Trilogy. It's been this way for several days now. This is the end of it, though, and it comes on a momentous day in English history mostly by serendipity. I should point out that this entry also makes 1,001 posts in the history of my blog--one thousand and one Tellers of Weird Tales.

You can fairly say that the villains in The Space Trilogy are not three-dimensional characters at all but strawmen. Maybe the whole thing is an allegory (or a melodrama) and so characterization takes a back seat to the author's main purpose. In any case, C.S. Lewis sets up his villains and then easily mows them down again, not so much with the events of his plot as with the weakness of their own words and beliefs: he leads us to see them as they truly are, as dangerous fools, liars, and charlatans. His villains don't stand a chance against his fully operational faith in greater things. People in the real world would seem fuller and a little more complicated than this comic book- or science fiction-type villain, but then Crazy Bernie or one of his acolytes spouts some bit of nonsense and you begin to see that there really are strawmen in the world. Stupid, ignorant, and dangerous in the extreme, they are in dire need of being mowed down.

I have been writing about gnosticism, which has reared its head again and again throughout history and since the nineteenth century in the form of Marxism and socialism. It's in science fiction and fantasy, too. In The Space Trilogy, it drives first Weston, then the people of N.I.C.E., towards an ultimate goal of pure-spirit. Here is one of them, Gould, in That Hideous Strength:

"In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould--all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must be rid of. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation."

He concludes:

"There will never be peace and order and discipline so long as there is sex. When man has thrown it away, then he will become governable." [Emphasis added; from Chapter 8.]

That is the goal and thus, I think, the anti-sex, anti-body (or mind-over-body or mind-more-important-than-body) attitude of progressivism and leftism, of socialism and statism, exhibited in 1984 for example but also explained in Anthony Burgess' 1985:

Fornication is forbidden by the State, since it offers a pleasure the State cannot control. To make love physically is an act of rebellion. (p. 101)

Remember, too, the story of Whittaker Chambers' conversion, recounted by Jonathan Leaf (from the website Stream, here):

     Suffering from melancholy and loneliness, Whittaker desperately wanted to believe in a cause that would offer him hope. And, for a time, the Communist movement offered him this. But there were costs involved in being part of it. One was that the Communists did not believe that their cadres should have children, as the party wanted their total devotion. Thus, when his wife became pregnant, the couple was told that she should have an abortion.
     This was a turning point for Chambers.
     He and his wife wanted a family, and they came to realize that the Communist Party’s ideas were in the most literal sense anti-life. [Emphasis added.]

The progressive/leftist/socialist/statist cause is of course notorious for its anti-life and by extension anti-body and anti-sex attitude. Or maybe it's the other way around: a person becomes anti-life, anti-body, and anti-sex before he goes looking for a creed that might affirm him in his convictions. I guess the reason is that true believers of this kind strive to be as gods or angels, just as in That Hideous Strength the members of N.I.C.E. attempt to become sexless, bodiless, and deathless, like the angelic eldila:

 "He says they don't breathe. He said also that they don't reproduce their species and don't die." (Chapter 9)

We should remember that Marx saw himself as being above ordinary people. There are people today--they will always be with us--corrupted to their souls with the same kind of arrogance and contempt for their fellow human beings. Is it bad of me if I say it will come as a kind of satisfaction to watch them become old, frail, and sickly--to see them finally on their deathbeds? Will they finally realize, in the confrontation, their own bodily-ness? Their own mortality? Where will all of their aspirations to godhood be then?

* * *

At the end of Chapter 9 of That Hideous Strength, there is a long statement as to the nature of the crisis at hand:

The physical sciences, good and innocent in themselves, had already, even in Ransom's own time, begun to be warped, had been subtly manœuvred in a certain direction. Despair of objective truth had been increasingly insinuated into the scientists; indifference to it, and a concentration upon mere power, had been the result. [. . .] Dreams of the far future destiny of man were dragging up from its shallow and unquiet grave the old dream of Man as God. The very experiences of the dissecting room and the pathological laboratory were breeding a conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress.

Here, then, is the program:

1. "Despair of objective truth" to be insinuated not just in scientists but in everyone. (Paul Johnson diagnosed more or less the same problem--that there is nothing fixed and all is relative--in his history Modern Times.)

2. "A concentration upon mere power": here is O'Brien in 1984:

The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. [. . .] The object of power is power." (From Part 3, Chapter 3)

Here is that dingbat congresswoman from New York recently, letting the mask slip before hiding herself again:

"So I don't want your money as much as we want your power. The people, not me."

It's always in the name of the people.

3. "[T]he old dream of Man as God", the gnostic dream, I guess, of escape from the body and the confines of Earth, into bodiless-ness, into pure-spirit, free to remake the Creation and to wander unbound over its vastnesses.

4. "[A] conviction that the stifling of all deep-set repugnances was the first essential for progress."

Then, a related question:

What should they [the people of N.I.C.E.] regard as too obscene, since they held that all morality was a mere subjective by-product of the physical and economic situations of men?

The French philosopher Paul Virilio (1932-2018) asked questions like it in his book Art and Fear (2003). You can read some of his words and what I wrote about him and his book by clicking here. (I should point out that this point--and Virilio's point--is just one more bit of evidence in support of Brian Aldiss' statement that all science fiction is gothic and descends from Frankenstein.)

There are of course people still at work trying to implement that program. Lewis recognized them in his day and predicted them in our own. In That Hideous Strength, they are defeated, at least for a while. Like the plague in Camus' novel, though, their ideas are certain to go simply back into a trunk, only to flare up again on another day. In any case, they're back, and they'll keep coming back, in one form or another, for as long as there are people, and wherever we happen to live in this universe. As Lewis wrote in the first book of his trilogy, we are bent and because of that we are to be quarantined on this silent planet.

* * *

George Orwell objected to the supernatural elements in That Hideous Strength. (You can read his review here.) He objected specifically to the resurrection of the old Arthurian wizard Merlin. I'm not sure that Lewis handled this part of his story very well. I admit to being confused by it, the way Orwell seems to have been confused. There is an idea that struck me in the Merlin plot, though, especially considering current events. After the crisis is resolved, Dimble, one of the good guys, observes:

". . . gradually we began to see all English history in a new way. We discovered the haunting."

     "What haunting?" asked Camilla.

    "How something we may call Britain is always haunted by something we may call Logres. Haven't you noticed that we are two countries? [. . . ] There has been a secret Logres [i.e., the original Arthurian realm] in the very heart of Britain all these years; an unbroken succession of Pendragons. [. . .] [I]n every age they and the little Logres which gathered round them have been the fingers which gave the tiny shove or the almost imperceptible pull to prod England out of the drunken sleep or to draw her back from the final outrage into which Britain tempted her." (Chapter 17)

This might be a strange thing for an Irishman like Lewis to write. Nonetheless, it resonates on this day--finally, finally--of Brexit, a day upon which England (Wales, too, Lewis' original home country) backs away from the elitism, internationalism, and so on of what is called "Europe" and into its own sovereignty and independence again. I wish I could say that Brexit also means a backing away from tyranny, but maybe we can't have everything all at once. If we could, where would the excitement be or the struggle originate? Anyway, I would like to congratulate the people of England and Wales--and anybody in Scotland and Northern Ireland who wants it--on their freeing themselves from an unwanted association with the Continent. The legend is that King Arthur would return one day to save his country. Who would have thought that he would become embodied in an American-born, upper-crust, tousle-haired Etonian? Then again, maybe England isn't saved just yet. In this week also of impeachment (I write on January 25), when the leaders of one American party, with their overweening pride in themselves and the perceived fineness of their own minds and ideas--contemporary gnostics, I suppose--are busy trying to undo the results of the last election and prevent the results of the next, and when the man they're trying to impeach eloquently speaks at a Pro-Life march in Washington, D.C., we might have reason to believe that God does indeed work in mysterious ways.

* * *

At last, towards the very end of That Hideous Strength, C.S. Lewis has the merest mention of a book, Trahison des clercs, and no mention at all of its author, Julien Benda (1867-1956), or any of his ideas. I haven't read this book and can't really speak to it. I guess Lewis threw it like the kitchen sink into That Hideous Strength and there it lies for us to consider.

And so ends this series.

That Hideous Strength, a paperback edition issued in 1955-1956 by Pan Books with cover art by "Sax," Rudolph Michael Sachs (1897-1969). The horse and rider at the bottom remind me of the painting "The Race Track" or "Death on a Pale Horse" by the American artist Albert Pinkham Ryder.

The book was called The Tortured Planet in an American edition from Avon, 1958. The cover art was by another horse--a workhorse named Richard M. Powers (1921-1996). The surname and Powers' Roman Catholic faith make me think that he was of Irish descent.

Finally, another British edition, from 1960, again with art by Sax. Note the gothic imagery of decay and apocalyptic destruction in both of his covers.

By the way, in my posting the other day on Anthem by Ayn Rand, I closed with a pulp-magazine cover showing her hero, who has renamed himself Prometheus, grasping a lightning bolt, representing his rediscovery of electrical power. Well, in That Hideous Strength the symbol of N.I.C.E. is described as "a muscular male nude grasping a thunderbolt." (Chapter 10) Remember that Frankenstein is subtitled "A Modern Prometheus." I guess if we are to displace God at the head of the universe and become godlike in our power and wisdom, we must literally steal his thunder.

Original text copyright 2020, 2023 Terence E. Hanley