Might be in the middle of a spate of book posts here. Be forewarned.
I just finished reading CS Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet. It was quite satisfying. I could tell that Lewis had read Wells―especially The First Men in the Moon―and Gulliver's Travels, and I'm sure a bunch of things I'm not really familiar with. The finished product is all Lewis, though.
Professor Ransom is a linguist. Not too hard to guess that he's based on Lewis's friend Tolkien. I enjoy how the last two chapters are basically the two of them debating in Lewis's head.
2 comments:
I don't mind book posts at all - so long as you don't mind me looking up the ones I haven't yet read..
I'm delighted to know you got around to reading Out of the Silent Planet, definitely one of my favorites. Besides having been influenced by Wells and Swift as far as space travel is concerned I also noticed a distinct flavor of Jules Verne - from the Earth to the Moon.
Ransom may indeed be a linguist but JRR Tolkien was a philologist and the two of them spent many many hours discussing religion and in mutual encouragement of writing stories no one else had attempted - at least not on that scale.
I recently finished rereading The Well at World's End, a high romance indeed and one I won't burden you with. But it was quite wonderful and easy to see just how much influence Wm Morris had on the two authors who produced such monumental literature.
Oh, I certainly don't mind that. Could provide more to talk about, in fact.
That's probably true as well. Verne would have been on his radar as someone who had done what Lewis was trying to do, albeit not with the same level of allegory.
The thing is, I'm sure that Lewis uses the word "philologist" to characterize Ransom as well. For some reason it escaped me when I was writing this post. He and Tolkien got each other, I think. They were different writers, but complementary.
I may have to investigate Morris further one of these days. He does seem to have been something of a renaissance man.
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