A question I asked to a few Lewis scholars (and gotten no decisive response yet).
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Seeing you’ve been digging deeply into Lewis’ writings for quite a while now, here is a Lewis trivia tidbit that I’d like to get your feedback on.
I assume you’ve read through Lewis’ Space Trilogy, particularly the last volume, That Hideous Strength. If he were living today, Lewis would likely be tagged as a “conspiracy theorist” as in fact portrays in this story secret societies, an attempt at World Government, planned riots, and world extermination plans...
Now here’s the thing, in chap. 22 of Out of the Silent Planet, Lewis drops a crafty hint that the novel has a basis in reality and that his intention is to warn readers about something:
"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 familiarized with certain ideas."
Now in brief note in the same book Lewis recognizes HG Well’s literary influence on his writing, but I’ve recently come across a couple of pamphlets by Wells that may have actually supplied Lewis with the basic plot for That Hideous Strength. More specifically the concept of the NICE...
One of these pamphlets written by Wells is The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints For A World Revolution. (1928). In this work Wells openly advocates a One World government.
"It is impossible for any clear-headed person to suppose that the ever more destructive stupidities of war can be eliminated from human affairs until some common political control dominates the earth, and unless certain pressures due to the growth of population, due to the enlarging scope of economic operations or due to conflicting standards and traditions of life, are disposed of. (chap. 6)
We have now stated broadly but plainly the idea of the world commonweal which is the objective of the Open Conspiracy, and we have made a preliminary examination of the composition of that movement, showing that it must be necessarily not a class development, but a convergence of many different sorts of people upon a common idea. Its opening task must be the elaboration, exposition, and propaganda of this common idea, a steady campaign to revolutionize education and establish a modern ideology in men's minds and, arising out of this, the incomparably vaster task of the realization of its ideas.
(....) The Open Conspiracy is not necessarily antagonistic to any existing government. The Open Conspiracy is a creative, organizing movement and not an anarchistic one. It does not want to destroy existing controls and forms of human association, but either to supersede or amalgamate them into a common world directorate. If constitutions, parliaments, and kings can be dealt with as provisional institutions, trustees for the coming of age of the world commonweal, and in so far as they are conducted in that spirit, the Open Conspiracy makes no attack upon them."(ch. 11)
Here is a pretty exhaustive bibliography of works by Wells
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._G._Wells_bibliographyAnd then, Wells actually has a text entitled “The New World Order” (1939) and another entitled After Democracy (1932).
Joel D. Heck has documented in his Chronologically Lewis (attached file) that on Aug 27th 1917 Lewis was reading Wells’ A Modern Utopia. Heck also notes that Lewis read Wells’ Outline of History. Clearly Lewis had read non-fiction works by Wells... Seeing Wells’ The Open Conspiracy was published in 1928, that is BEFORE Lewis’ conversion, there is a good chance he read that...
Any way, I was just wondering if you’d bumped into any evidence of a link between Wells’ influence (particularly The Open Conspiracy) and Lewis’ That Hideous Strength??
Paul Gosselin
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The beneficence of fear most of us have learned during the period of “crises” that led up to the present war. My own experience is something like this. I am progressing along the path of life in my ordinary contentedly fallen and godless condition, absorbed in a merry meeting with my friends for the morrow or a bit of work that tickles my vanity today, a holiday or a new book, when suddenly a stab of abdominal pain that threatens serious disease, or a headline in the newspapers that threatens us all with destruction, sends this whole pack of cards tumbling down. At first I am overwhelmed, and all my little happinesses look like broken toys. Then, slowly and reluctantly, bit by bit, I try to bring myself into the frame of mind that I should be in at all times. I remind myself that all these toys were never intended to possess my heart, that my true good is in another world and my only real treasure is Christ.
(CS Lewis - Problem of Pain - 1940)
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