The Space Trilogy
Book 1 of the series
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| Author | Clive Staples Lewis |
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| Cover artist | Brian Froud (omnibus) |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Science fiction |
| Publisher | The Bodley Head (first and first omnibus) |
| Published | 1938–1945 1990 (first omnibus) |
| Media type | Print (hardcover & paperback) (omnibus, 651 pp) |
The Space Trilogy or Cosmic Trilogy is a series of science fiction novels by C. S. Lewis, famous for his later series The Chronicles of Narnia. A philologist named Elwin Ransom is the hero of the first two novels and an important character in the third.
The books in the trilogy are:
In 1946, the publishing house Avon (now an imprint of HarperCollins) published a version of That Hideous Strength specially abridged by C. S. Lewis entitled The Tortured Planet.
An unfinished manuscript published posthumously in 1977, named The Dark Tower by Walter Hooper, its editor, features Elwin Ransom in a less central role as involved with an experiment that allows its participants to view on a special screen their own location in a parallel universe. Its authenticity was impeached by Lewis scholar Kathryn Lindskoog in her scholarly criticism of Walter Hooper, but in 2003 Alastair Fowler established its authenticity when he wrote in the Yale Review that he saw Lewis writing the manuscript that would be subsequently published as The Dark Tower, heard him reading it, and discussed it with him.
Lewis stated in a letter to Roger Lancelyn Green:
What immediately spurred me to write was Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men … and an essay in J.B.S. Haldane's Possible Worlds both of wh[ich] seemed to take the idea of such [space] travel seriously and to have the desperately immoral outlook wh[ich] I try to pillory in Weston. I like the whole interplanetary ideas as a mythology and simply wished to conquer for my own (Christian) p[oin]t of view what has always hitherto been used by the opposite side. I think H. G. Wells's First Men in the Moon the best of the sort I have read …
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Wikipedia