CS Lewis: Out of the Silent Planet

(Warning – the following review may have a few spoilers for those who have not read this excellent SF classic yet.)

I first read Out of the Silent Planet when I was a student, over twenty years ago, and it made a huge impression on me at the time. I’ve re-read it since, a couple of times, the most recent occasion being earlier this summer, and one curious thing I’ve found is that the book appears to have shrunk, over the last two decades. Not in a literal sense, obviously, as the number of words probably hasn’t changed, but what I mean is that the events of the story seem to take place over a much shorter time frame than before. What seemed like a tale of numerous adventures, journeys and encounters across the exotic surface of Mars now appears briefer, far more condensed.

And my point? It is that so much depends on our perceptions. The book hasn’t changed, but I have. And fundamentally this is one of the things the book is all about – a perceptual shift.

Out of the Silent Planet is on one level a voyage to another world, and CS Lewis was going in 1938 where authors such as HG Wells and Jules Verne had already ventured. The hard science part is barely there; for instance the space ship, into which Ransom is bundled by his kidnappers Weston and Devine, and which transports the trio to another planet, is powered by processes that are never described. (This, in itself, is not a failing, in my opinion. HG Wells invented a fictitious material – Cavorite – to get his adventurers to the Moon, and Jules Verne simply fired his space travellers out of a giant cannon.) Malacandra is a dying world, like so many other early visions of Mars, a place where life arose before it did on Earth and is now in a state of decline; not a particularly new idea.

No, what sets Out of the Silent Planet apart is what happens to middle-aged professor Elwin Ransom – and by extension to the rest of us, because despite his academic background, Ransom is a type of Everyman figure. Abducted by his old school acquaintance Devine and the sinister Weston, Ransom is taken across the gulf of space to Malacandra, where the others have established a base, consisting of a rudimentary hut. Why are they doing this? So that Ransom can be delivered up as a kind of human sacrifice, in return for Malacandrian gold.

In the absence of any real information, he is understandably terrified at what might be about to happen to him at the hands of the menacing natives, the sorns or séroni. He breaks away, and starts to flee across the confusing landscape of this alien world. And this is where his transformation starts.

I don’t want to reveal much more about the story, for fear of ruining it completely for readers who haven’t yet had the pleasure. But I have some observations about aspects of the novel where Lewis’s writing seems psychologically true to life.

Firstly, as Ransom runs for his life across the surface of Malacandra, he experiences the landscape as a confusing blur of strange colours and shapes, as the vegetation is utterly unfamiliar to him and the creatures even more so. The total sense of disorientation is convincing, because we tend to see the world as a collection of familiar constructs. We don’t see an expanse of rugged brown stuff crowned by masses of flat greenish tendrils; we see an oak tree, because “oak tree” is a discrete concept we are familiar with.

In a similar way, people who are blind from birth and who later become able to see, find the visual world a perplexing mass of colours and shapes until they learn to perceive things. It is also reminiscent of the (probably apocryphal) stories of native Americans unable to see Columbus’s sailing ships, as they were completely outside their experience. Perception is something that we learn; it is a human skill, like language.

In time, Ransom meets the Malacandrians, and eventually he rejoins his fellow travellers from Thulcandra, the Silent Planet (Earth.) On the outside, he is little different to how he was before. But on the inside…

We experience culture shock when we are taken out of our familiar surroundings and placed in a foreign land, with foreign people. Everything seems wrong, strange, even threatening. There are degrees of foreignness – for the average native English person, Paris is foreign but manageably so, Istanbul is somewhat further along the scale and a Mongolian yurt must be at some sort of apex of pure foreignness for those used to suburban streets, corner shops and Victorian terraces.

Now place the same English person on Malacandra, with its séroni, hrossa and pfifltriggi! And yet we adapt. Although Ransom never quite loses his instinctive feelings of apprehension when dealing with the spindly, feathered séroni, he arrives at the knowledge that these are neither monstrosities nor bizarre talking animals but hnau, or rational beings. They have undergone a radical transformation in his mind.

Weston and Devine also undergo a transformation. For where there is culture shock, there is also reverse culture shock. The familiar becomes strange and by living in foreign parts we become assimilated by foreignness, which gives us the freedom to see our native culture with fresh eyes. That also goes for our fellow natives. At first Ransom is unable to see his erstwhile kidnappers; having become accustomed to Malacandra, he is aware of a couple of approaching bipedal oddities covered in strange growths, and it takes him a while to realise these are humans.

I haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of his book; there’s just so much more. I haven’t mentioned Lewis’s Christianity, his depiction of a world where three kinds of sentient life form live in harmony and his ridiculing of imperialism – this review could easily have been ten times its current length. Suffice it to say that Out of the Silent Planet occupies a special place in my heart; although I tend to resonate more with the writings of HG Wells, there is something about Lewis’s vision of a universe inhabited by benevolent spirits (eldil) and rational beings that touches me – would that even a part of it were true.

© Alex Cull, 9th July 2008

(This is a book review I posted on Planet Bookworm earlier this month.)

The Fear of Death

“The fear of death”. How often do we hear this phrase? Why is it that we fear death so much, and how does this fear manifest itself?

Two distinct kinds of fear spring to mind, one related to our animal origins and the other a human fear that is bound up with the very nature of consciousness. I will briefly explore both.

First, our animal heritage. When a cat or a mouse or a human are faced with an impending threat to life and limb, a number of specific physical reactions kick in.

Adrenaline floods through the body, causing the heart rate to speed up like crazy. Simultaneously the bronchial passages dilate and the lungs draw in larger volumes of air, all the better to grab more oxygen. The result? A rush of oxygenated, glucose-rich blood thundering through the arteries, on its way to the skeletal muscles, which is where it will be needed if we want to take immediate action. Some blood vessels constrict, others dilate, in order to channel resources efficiently.

What else happens? The senses become extremely selective and we experience tunnel vision and auditory exclusion (tunnel hearing). Weird things also happen to our sense of time passing (the technical word for this distortion is tachipsychia). At the same time, other processes, such as digestion, salivation and sex are placed on hold.

When these changes happen, we are driven to do one of two things – fight or run for our lives, hence the name of this response, “fight or flight”, first identified by physiologist Walter Cannon in 1915. Depending on the situation, it can propel us down to the very depths of panic or up to the highest levels of heroism, should our children, for instance, be trapped in a burning house. This fear is part of our animal heritage which comes into play when our lives, and those of our loved ones, are physically threatened.

But there is another fear of death, which is (as far as anyone knows) peculiar to human beings.

This has also been called an existential crisis, and fundamentally, it is a fear of annihilation, of ceasing to be. We tend to identify with our conscious mind or ego, and the thought of no more “I” after death can be intolerable and terrifying. It is also difficult to imagine. How can “I” stop existing? How can there be a world without “me” in it?

This kind of crisis or panic can affect us when we are in a vulnerable state, after a loved one has died, perhaps, or when we become elderly or are suffering from a life-threatening illness, such as cancer. It can leave us feeling anxious, isolated, unbearably lonely.

Just as small children can be fearful and resist falling asleep, so adults can be fearful and resist the ultimate sleep.

Is there a cure for it?

The traditional way in which humans have armoured themselves against the fear of death is through religion. Most of the world’s religions postulate an afterlife, a way in which a person can survive death, either as an individual spirit or a fragment returning to the great ocean of spirit, which we commonly call God.

But there are so many religions, each with its version of Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana or Elysium, and each with its various sects. Which one to choose? And can any of them prove beyond reasonable doubt that we do survive the deaths of our bodies? Speaking for myself, the answer to the last question is no.

There is also the materialist world view, i.e. that when the body dies, the atoms of which it is composed go their separate ways and that is it. No spirit, no soul, no God and no afterlife.

A materialist might argue that we can survive, in a fashion. We can live on in our children and grandchildren, and we can do good deeds in the world, so that our descendants have a better life than we did.

However, a moment’s thought will dispel this hope. If we are nought but atoms, then so are our children and our grandchildren. All the future generations who will inherit the goodness we create, will in turn become dust and be lost forever. And this will go on until the universe ends, or humanity becomes extinct, or perhaps if science enables us to prolong our lives indefinitely, which might not even be possible.

So is the situation hopeless? Perhaps not, but the answer might lie at the edges of current knowledge, not at its heart.

We have known for a long time that people in the grip of a life-threatening illness or accident sometimes experience an NDE or “near-death experience”. There are quite a few parts to this experience, and it varies, but here are some common elements. For instance, persons at the brink of death may find themselves floating or levitating, and looking down at their own (completely inert) bodies.

They might also have strong feelings of serenity and joy. Light also seems to be an important factor; they may move through a tunnel of light and enter a realm that appears to be aglow with a light that seems to be a spiritual, rather than physical, phenomenon. They may also meet previously-deceased relatives, undergo a detailed review of their lives to date, and encounter a being who resembles a deity, before returning to their physical bodies.

It is very difficult (some might say impossible) to prove that any of this is real. What would it take to prove, to a die-hard sceptic, that we survive physical death? One of the closest accounts we have to a demonstration that we exist independently of our mortal bodies, is the experience of singer-songwriter Pam Reynolds, who in 1991 underwent an operation, during which, for a while, she was clinically dead, with no blood flowing through her brain and no brain-wave activity.

Later, she is said to have given accurate descriptions of the medical procedures she had undergone, which were corroborated by the hospital staff, and it is very difficult to see how she could have sensed or known about these procedures, in the condition she was in.

So, do this and other accounts of NDEs provide proof that we survive, beyond all reasonable doubt? Well, no they don’t. But they are very interesting and consistent, nonetheless. Science has not been able to validate them (and maybe it will always be thus) but neither has it been able to disprove or debunk them, completely.

And there is more. People who have experienced them also find that their fear of dying has diminished, or has disappeared altogether. There was a study carried out in the Netherlands of survivors of cardiac arrest, which was published in the medical journal The Lancet in 2001. This study confirmed that people who had an NDE also had a significant increase in a belief in an afterlife, and a decrease in their fear of death, compared with those people who had not had the experience.

This is not proof that we each have a spirit or soul essence that survives the dissolution of our physical bodies, but it is an indication, perhaps, a sign, a ray of hope. It is difficult to see how a mere hallucination or dream, however vivid, could predictably have such a life-changing effect.

It will have no bearing on the purely physical response we have to the prospect of death. When immediate danger comes, our animal nature will always prompt us to fight or flee. But when we are lying alone in the dark at three in the morning, anxiously contemplating our mortality, then it may well provide some solace.

Perhaps the NDE phenomenon is the best antidote we can reasonably expect to have, for the fear of death.

Alex Cull, 2nd June 2008

(Another article I posted on Helium.com earlier this year.)