Talk:Out of the Silent Planet

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One point about the analysis: it is true that the inhabitants of Mars represent intelligent races which had not experienced The Fall. However, the novel also references a cataclysm which resulted in the extinction of the former inhabitants of the planet, hence the "red stone clouds" which give Mars its distictive coloration, and the story of the origin of the Martial "canals".

And who do you suppose caused the cataclysm? Could it be...? Also, it resulted in the extinction of only one race--the other three survived.

Anyway, I'm impressed by this article! My evidence that Maleldil is the Son is that he's "the Young" and the hrossa say he lives with the Old One, who I take to be the Father. Also the best line in Perelandra, something like "Am I not also named Ransom?"

--JerryFriedman

I like your reorganization of the terminology, Matt. However, it bothers me to say that Maleldil means Jesus when the Malacandrans know him as the Creator but not as the Savior. No doubt my version can be improved.

How sure are you that Oyarsas are archangels? <http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cbenton/fallen%20angels.htm#notable> lists Lucifer as a seraph, so if Lucifer is Satan's former name and Satan is the Oyarsa of Earth, then the Oyarsas would be seraphim, the highest order. On the other hand, according to Hierarchy_of_angels the older Christian tradition was that Satan was a cherub and a modern belief is that he was an archangel. In any case, I can't match Lewis's astrological Oyarsas with the little I know about this stuff—was there supposed to be a feminine archangel?

On a less substantive note, in a spirit of compromise I left in the spaces you put around the em dashes but I changed the commas in "God or, specifically,..." back to the way I had them.

JerryFriedman

Maybe we differ in what we want the list to show; I view it as listing how C. S. Lewis used concepts from the Christian faith in his fiction, and explicitly giving the correspondence between things in the book and Christian concepts; in that case, Jesus Christ is the "binding" that a general reader will associate with Lewis' Maleldil. Maybe you're looking for a straight definition of who, say, Maleldil is in the context of the book? Moreover, the name "Jesus Christ" doesn't particularly connotate salvation. For example, in the Bible, Gabriel referred to Jesus as "Jesus", even though it was the creator-not-saviour relationship. Similarly, in (presumably) Lewis' theology, Jesus wasn't the saviour even to every human. — Matt 13:59, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Well, I admit it's a subtle point. But to clarify, when we say Jesus, we mean a human being who lived about 2000 years ago in Israel and who Christians believe was the son of God who at least offered salvation to humanity and an incarnation of one aspect of God. When the Malacandrans say Maleldil, they don't know about any of that except the "one aspect of God" part. Even Oyarsa doesn't know till Ransom tells him. So yes, I am thinking of the context of the book. Anyway, I'm going to try to streamline the definition in keeping with your point that the identification with Jesus is the important thing to most readers.
I'm also going to try to make "archangel" less definite. By the way, exactly this same glossary is listed in the articles on Perelandra and That Hideous Strength, so when people are satisfied with the revision, we should probably copy it to those articles. JerryFriedman 16:58, 8 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Perhaps we should get rid of the "archangel", or qualify it with "possibly" and mention other types of "angels in authority". Regarding the other articles, I noticed that too, and replication is generally a bad idea; I'd suggest that we create a separate article for the entire trilogy (plus The Dark Tower) — maybe Space Trilogy — and placing this there instead of in each article.
I support that idea - meant to suggest it a while ago, then forgot. The cast & cosmology isn't fully explained in any single one of the books, anyway. --Hob 03:55, 9 Jul 2004 (UTC)
Consider it done. Well, started, anyway. --JerryFriedman 19:09, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
And now I'm thinking that the last two paragraphs of this article should be under Space Trilogy, maybe with a heading for "Ransom" that other articles can link to. But I don't have time to think about it right now.

Contents

[edit] Second Chance?

By the way, does anyone know in what sense Malacandra is a "second-chance" Garden of Eden? --JerryFriedman 19:25, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)

It seems a bit odd (it would fit as a description for the narrative of Perelandra). I think an unqualified "a kind of Garden of Eden" is perfectly adequate. — Matt 23:15, 12 Jul 2004 (UTC)
In my prior (anonymous) incarnation I was the one who inserted "second-chance", because of the afore-mentioned cataclysm. The paradise of Malacandra is the second habitat for the indigenous mortals, the second being the "petrified forest clouds".
But, on the other hand, mainstream Christianity has accepted the concept of an angelic revolt in the pre-Creation period preceding Genesis 1. So I am not wedded to the idea that Malacanda as described by the novel is a second chance. Ellsworth 22:56, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Got it. When you put it that way, I have nothing against mentioning the idea and maybe connecting the handramit with the supposed canals, but I didn't understand the way it was written before. —JerryFriedman 23:38, 30 Aug 2004 (UTC)

I have not read the novel in like, a decade-plus, so I don't feel real comfortable adding the Mars back-story to the article. So I'll leave it to others. Ellsworth 00:45, 31 Aug 2004 (UTC)

Hi --- John Taylor, Ottawa, Canada. Here's my $0.02 about the "second chance." Apparently in the distant past there had occurred a watershed event that did not quite rise to the level of a fall from grace but which required severe corrective measures from Oyarsa ("some I healed, some I unbodied"). I would say that this justifies the comment about "second chance Garden of Eden."

BTW, I contributed the original article on OOTSP, all vestiges of which are long gone :-) I have read the Space Trilogy probably 30+ times (no exaggeration) and each time I am struck by the author's genius and skill.

[edit] Questions and suggestions

I like the detailed synopsis. However, I have some questions, and I don't have the book at present. Didn't the eldil summon Ransom to Oyarsa before the hñeraki hunt, and didn't Hyoi blame his death on failing to obey the summons immediately? Is hñeraki singular or (as I remember it) plural? Does Ransom decide at the end to oppose Weston, or is that an inference from Perelandra?

Since the eldila are mentioned in all three books, I think the material on them here should be moved to Space Trilogy#Eldila. —JerryFriedman 23:30, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)

I forgot one. It would be nice to put in when Ransom realized that Malacandra was Mars. Was that in conversation with Augray? —JerryFriedman 16:43, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)

No; Ransom suspects quite early on that Malacandra may be Mars, or the Moon. He realises it's Mars when he's looking at the carvings on the monoliths which show Malacandra in Mars's place in the solar system, just before his encounter with the pfifltrig --86.53.37.230 16:47, 17 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Deleted sentence

I deleted a sentence saying that Out of the Silent Planet was a theistic answer to the Fermi Paradox. First of all, sources disagree on when (or whether) Fermi asked "Where are they?" but the earliest date I found was "the '40s", later than OotSP. Second, no answer is clear in the book. One can infer that other intelligent races haven't visited us because they know space travel isn't part of Maleldil's plan, and possibly also because Maleldil didn't create any outside of the solar system, but I don't think there's anything explicit. Lewis seems to have been much more concerned with the argument that humanity's destiny is to colonize space as far as possible. That's what Weston tries to say and Ransom tries to translate to Oyarsa. —JerryFriedman 19:51, 7 Mar 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Please avoid critical essays

I've just done a big revert, deleting the anonmyously added text I've copied below. I assume this is the same editor who's been adding his/her insights on other Lewis books, so please see my comments at Talk:That Hideous Strength#Please avoid critical essays. In this case, the deleted text is about one-third critical opinion that violates WP:NPOV, one-third unnecessarily detailed synopsis, and one-third explanation of the broader setting of the trilogy that belongs in Space Trilogy if anywhere. Sorry to be a party pooper. ←Hob 04:52, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

deleted text follows:

Interestingly, the eldila are also the classical Graeco-Roman gods, a point which is made quite explicit in the later books of the series, and the Oyarsa of Mars is quite literally the being which the Romans called the god Mars. Lewis, like most intellectual Europeans of his time (and the centuries before) was throughly familar with Classical Greek and Latin writings and regarded them as essential foundations of civilization. He reconciled the old polytheistic religion with his deeply Christian worldview by the expedient of assuming that these were never gods, and never claimed to be ones, that they always served the one true God, and that it was only the mistake of the pre-Christian Greeks and Romans to worship them as such. (The early Christians, who lived when this religion was a living force, would probsbly not be pleased with Lewis' idea...)

The same mixture is evident also in Lewis' "Narnia" series, where the inhabitants of the magic land flock to the banner of the lion Aslan who is a manifestation of Jesus, which does not at all stop them from feeling nostalgia to "The time when Bacchus visited Narnia and the streams ran with wine instead of water".

Lewis' friend Tolkien, too, depicts in his "Silmarillion" a pantheon of beings, the Valar, which resemble the Graeco-Roman gods, but are not true gods but rahter the servants of the real supreme God (called Eru or Iluvatar).

....

The dialogue of Oyarsa with Weston, Ransom acting as interpreter, is clearly intended to express Lewis's deep criticism of the modern materialisic Western culture (choosing the name "Weston" for this character might have been far from an accidental choice) and especially its superior attitude to "primitive" cultures.

For example, Weston states in English: "(...)Your tribal life with its stone-age weapons and bee-hive huts, its primitive coracles and elementary social structure, has nothing to compare with our civilzation - with our science, medicine and law, our armies, our architecture, our commerce, and our transport system which is fast annihilating space and time. Our right to supersede you is the right of the higher over the lower."

Ransom tries to render all this as faithfully as possible into the Malacandrian tongue and what he comes up with is: "(...) He says that among you hnau [intelligent creatures] of one kindred all live together and the hrossa have spears like those we used a very long time ago and your huts are small and round and your boats are small and light and like our old ones, and you have only one ruler. He says it is different with us. He says we know much. There is a thing happens in our world when the body of a living creature feels pains and becomes weak, and he says we sometimes know how to stop it. He says we have many bent people and we kill them or shut them in huts and we have people for settling quarrels between the bent hanu about their huts and mates and things. He says we have many ways for the hanu of one land to kill those of another and some are trained to do it. He says we build very big and strong huts of stone and other things - like the pfifltriggi. And he says we exchange many things among ourselves and can carry heavy weights very quickly a long way. Because of all this, he says it would not be the act of a bent hnau if our people killed all your people".

Of the two "bent" humans appearing in the book, Devine's depravity is simply greed while Weston's is more complex. Weston has "bent" self-preservation and the well-being of others into an ideal of preserving humanity—though he admits he has no idea what form humanity will take in the future, or even if the future of humanity is another, non-human species. To Weston, this does not matter. The preservation of humanity is the important thing; and if necessary he will destroy every inhabitant of Mars in favor of his species. He will also sacrifice Ransom—it is the ideal, not people, that matters.

[edit] Oyarsa doesn't humiliate Weston and Devine

Previous version of page said Oyarsa humiliates the two by dissecting their beliefs. But neither one is conscious of being humiliated. Devine basically goes crazy with gold-lust and colonialism; he humiliates himself. Weston is silenced by Oyarsa's argument, but in the end comes back fighting (verbally), however hopelessly; Oyarsa meets him on equal ground of debate, and wins, but doesn't humiliate him. Cphoenix 05:34, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

This is a comment about "Second Chance". Earlier in the century there was a theory that the solar system developed from the outside in; thus science fiction traditionally presented Mars as old and dying, Venus as young and primitive, and Earth in the middle. I think Lewis is following that convention. By that reasoning, the situation on Mars started earlier than the Fall and is not a "Second Chance". On the contrary, it is the "natural" state that was denied to humans on the "fallen" Earth.

Furthermore, I don't think Lewis had detailed ranks of angels in mind. For purposes of the story there are Mal-eldil (God) in charge of the universe, Oyarses in charge of planets, and various eldila that served them.

CharlesTheBold 12:01, 1 February 2007 (UTC) CharlesTheBold

[edit] Release Date

The back cover of my 1996 Scribner Paperback edition says Out of The Silent Planet was first published in 1943. This article says 1938. Anyone know why the discrepancy?

24.60.244.19 18:44, 3 February 2007 (UTC) ShellysCellar

[edit] Fair use rationale for Image:CSLewis OutOfTheSilentPlanet.jpg

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BetacommandBot (talk) 04:12, 12 February 2008 (UTC)