C. Lewis - The Space Trilogy

The immediate result of this letter was an invitation to spend a weekend with Dr Ransom. He told me his whole story, and since then he and I have been almost continuously at work on the mystery. A good many facts, which I have no intention of publishing at present, have fallen into our hands; facts about planets in general and about Mars in particular, facts about medieval Platonists, and (not least in importance) facts about the Professor to whom I am giving the fictitious name of Weston. A systematic report of these facts might, of course, be given to the civilised world: but that would almost certainly result in universal incredulity and in a libel action from Weston. At the same time, we both feel that we cannot be silent. We are being daily confirmed in our belief that the oyarses of Mars was right when it said that the present ‘celestial year’ was to be a revolutionary one, that the long isolation of our own planets is nearing its end, and that great doings are on foot. We have found reason to believe that the medieval Platonists were living in the same celestial year as ourselves – in fact, that it began in the twelfth century of our era – and that the occurrence of the name Oyarsa (Latinised as oyarses ) in Bernardus Silvestris is not an accident. And we have also evidence – increasing almost daily – that ‘Weston’, or the force or forces behind ‘Weston’, will play a very important part in the events of the next few centuries, and, unless we prevent them, a very disastrous one. We do not mean that they are likely to invade Mars – our cry is not merely ‘Hands off Malacandra.’ The dangers to be feared are not planetary but cosmic, or at least solar, and they are not temporal but eternal. More than this it would be unwise to say.

It was Dr Ransom who first saw that our only chance was to publish in the form of fiction what would certainly not be listened to as fact. He even thought – greatly overrating my literary powers – that this might have the incidental advantage of reaching a wider public, and that, certainly, it would reach a great many people sooner than ‘Weston’. To my objection that if accepted as fiction, it would for that very reason be regarded as false, he replied that there would be indications enough in the narrative for the few readers – the very few – who at present were prepared to go farther into the matter.

‘And they,’ he said, ‘will easily find out you, or me, and will easily identify Weston. Anyway,’ he continued, ‘what we need for the moment is not so much a body of belief as a body of people familiarised with certain ideas. If we could even effect in one per cent of our readers a change-over from the conception of Space to the conception of Heaven, we should have made a beginning.’

What neither of us foresaw was the rapid march of events which was to render the book out of date before it was published. These events have already made it rather a prologue to our story than the story itself. But we must let it go as it stands. For the later stages of the adventure – well, it was Aristotle, long before Kipling, who taught us the formula, ‘That is another story.’

(Being extracts from a letter written by the original of ‘Dr Ransom’ to the author)

… I think you are right, and after the two or three corrections (marked in red) the MS will have to stand. I won’t deny that I am disappointed, but then any attempt to tell such a story is bound to disappoint the man who has really been there. I am not now referring to the ruthless way in which you have cut down all the philological part, though, as it now stands, we are giving our readers a mere caricature of the Malacandrian language. I mean something more difficult, something which I couldn’t possibly express. How can one ‘get across’ the Malacandrian smells ? Nothing comes back to me more vividly in my dreams … especially the early morning smell in those purple woods, where the very mention of ‘early morning’ and ‘woods’ is misleading because it must set you thinking of earth and moss and cobwebs and the smell of our own planet, but I’m thinking of something totally different. More ‘aromatic’ … yes, but then it is not hot or luxurious or exotic as that word suggests. Something aromatic, spicy, yet very cold, very thin, tingling at the back of the nose – something that did to the sense of smell what high, sharp violin notes do to the ear. And mixed with that I always hear the sound of the singing – great hollow hound-like music from enormous throats, deeper than Chaliapin, a ‘warm, dark noise’. I am homesick for my old Malacandrian valley when I think of it; yet God knows when I heard it there I was homesick enough for the Earth.

Of course you are right; if we are to treat it as a story you must telescope the time I spent in the village during which ‘nothing happened’. But I grudge it. Those quiet weeks, the mere living among the hrossa , are to me the main thing that happened. I know them, Lewis; that’s what you can’t get into a mere story. For instance, because I always take a thermometer with me on a holiday (it has saved many a one from being spoiled) I know that the normal temperature of a hross is 103°. I know – though I can’t remember learning it – that they live about 80 Martian years, or 160 earth years; that they marry at about 20 (= 40); that their droppings, like those of the horse, are not offensive to themselves, or to me, and are used for agriculture; that they don’t shed tears, or blink; that they do get (as you would say) ‘elevated’ but not drunk on a gaudy night – of which they have many. But what can one do with these scraps of information? I merely analyse them out of a whole living memory that can never be put into words, and no one in this world will be able to build up from such scraps quite the right picture. For example, can I make even you understand how I know, beyond all question, why it is that the Malacandrians don’t keep pets and, in general, don’t feel about their ‘lower animals’ as we do about ours? Naturally it is the sort of thing they themselves could never have told me. One just sees why when one sees the three species together. Each of them is to the others both what a man is to us and what an animal is to us. They can talk to each other, they can co-operate, they have the same ethics; to that extent a sorn and a hross meet like two men. But then each finds the other different, funny, attractive as an animal is attractive. Some instinct starved in us, which we try to soothe by treating irrational creatures almost as if they were rational, is really satisfied in Malacandra. They don’t need pets.

By the way, while we are on the subject of species, I am rather sorry that the exigencies of the story have been allowed to simplify the biology so much. Did I give you the impression that each of the three species was perfectly homogeneous? If so, I misled you. Take the hrossa ; my friends were black hrossa , but there are also silver hrossa , and in some of the western handramits one finds the great crested hross – ten feet high, a dancer rather than a singer, and the noblest animal, after man, that I have ever seen. Only the males have the crest. I also saw a pure white hross at Meldilorn, but like a fool I never found out whether he represented a sub-species or was a mere freak like our terrestrial albino. There is also at least one other kind of sorn besides the kind I saw – the soroborn or red sorn of the desert, who lives in the sandy north. He’s a corker by all accounts.