This third and final installment of the space trilogy was quite different from the previous two. It started off slower, and stayed slower until quite a way in. It was very much “down to earth” for a good part of the book. I do think it was one of the more brilliant of his novels and perhaps the most prophetic. With a few updates to setting and technology, this book could just have easily been set in the past decade rather than 3/4 of a century ago.
The great technological steam engine has continued to roll forward and the idea of enhancing and even supplanting humanity is now spoken not just in the shadows but on podcasts and YouTube videos by very influential people. I have had a sneaking suspicion that our current “AI moment” is this generations “Tower of Babel”, but even it isn’t, the tower is being built. The powers driving technology development in the world today are in fast pursuit of a means of defeating and avoiding the death which looms over each of us. Make no mistake, this is the fundamental driving motivation behind the investments being made today - every other gain or loss is a mere side effect to achieving immortality, in one way or another.
The other keen insight that Lewis has is the recognition that these technological marvels are not spiritually void. When we rush headlong into these things we summon what we do know from where we have not been. There are real spiritual forces at work in the world and we are naive to think they are absent from the efforts of technology (and AI, in particular).
Highlights
Chapter 1
The bureaucratic board meeting results in a manipulated decision to sell Bragdon Wood. Jane has disturbing nightmare and seeks help from Mr. and Mrs. Dimble.
We get to Jane’s drab existence right out the gate:
“Mutual society, help, and comfort,” said Jane bitterly. In reality marriage had proved to be the door out of a world of work and comradeship and laughter and innumerable things to do, into something like solitary confinement. (12)
The way things are done now is through confusion, misdirection, and bureaucratic manipulation:
Three years ago, if Mark Studdock had come to a college Meeting at which such a question was to be decided, he would have expected to hear the claims of sentiment against progress and beauty against utility openly debated. Today, as he took his seat in the Soler, the the long upper room on the south of Lady Alice, he expected no such matter. He knew now that that was not the way things are done. (21)
Jane’s discovering in Mrs. Dimble someone to confide in:
And then, for a moment, Mrs. Dimble became simply a grown-up as grown-ups had been when one was a very small child: large, warm, soft objects to whom one ran with bruised knees or broken toys. (28)
Chapter 2
Mark gets invited to the insider circle and connects with Feverstone who invites him to take on a role with NICE. Jane is more uneasy about her dreams and contemplates a visit to the Dimble’s recommendation.
The good wine was beginning to do its good office. We have all known the kind of clergyman who tends to forget his clerical collar after the third glass; but Busby’s habit was the reverse. It was after the third glass that he began to remember his collar. As wine and candlelight loosened his tongue, the parson still latent within him after thirty years’ apostasy began to wake into strange galvanic life. (35)
Mark was silent. The giddy sensation of being suddenly whirled up from one plane of secrecy to another, coupled with the growing effect of Curry’s excellent port, prevented him from speaking. (38)
“Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest - which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge of. Quite.”
Jane travels on the train but barely notices anyone else:
for though she was theoretically an extreme democrat, no social class save her own had yet become a reality to her in any place except the printed page. (48)
Chapter 3
Mark travels to N.I.C.E., uncertain why he’s there or what he’ll be doing, left feeling like an outsider but with a taste of the thrill of being an insider. Jane travels to see Miss Ironwood and is told that her disturbing dreams are actually visions of reality, and that she could put them to use saving humanity, or else others might want her to use them for harm.
Mark dis not ask again in so many words what the N.I.C.E. wanted him to do; partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because he began to be afraid that he was supposed to know this already, and partly because a perfectly direct question would have sounded a crudity in that room - a crudity which might suddenly exclude him from the warm and almost drugged atmosphere of vague, yet heavily important, confidence in which he was gradually being enfolded. (52)
Mark’s initial euphoria being included by Hardcastle:
All this was disagreeable. But it was made up for by the deliciously esoteric character of the conversation. Several times that day he had been made to feel himself an outsider; that feeling completely disappeared while Miss Hardcastle was talking to him. He had the sense of getting in. (67)
Bill Hingest gets it.
“…I happen to believe that you can’t study men; you can only get to know them, which is quite a different thing. Because you study them, you want to make the lower orders govern the country and listen to classical music, which is balderdash. You also want to take away from them everything which makes life worth living and not only from them but from everyone except a parcel of prigs and professors.”
“I suppose there are two views about everything,” said Mark. “Eh? Two views? There are a dozen views about everything until you know the answer. Then there’s never more than one. But it’s no affair of mine. Good night.” (70)
Chapter 4
Husbands were make to be talked to. It helps them concentrate their minds on what they’re reading - like the sound of a weir. There! - you’re yawning again. (75)
And at the name of Jesus, Mark, who would have lectured on abortion or perversion to an audience of young women without a qualm, felt himself so embarrassed that he knew his cheeks were slightly reddening; and he became so angry with himself and Mr. Straik at this discovery that they proceeded to redden very much indeed. This was exactly the kind of conversation he could not endure; and never since the well remembered misery of scripture lessons at school had he felt so uncomfortable. He muttered something about his ignorance of theology. (77)
Though he had never noticed it himself, he had a great reluctance, in his work, ever to use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believes as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen. (85)
Chapter 5
Mark intends to quit NICE and ends up stuck even further. Jane gets recruited to serve Ransom.
Isn’t is absolutely essential to keep a fierce Left and a fierce Right, both on their toes and each terrified of the other? That’s how we get things done. Any opposition to the N.I.C.E. is represented as a Left racket in the Right papers and a Right racket in the Left papers. If it’s properly done, you get each side outbidding the other in support of us - to refute the enemy slanders. Of course we’re non-political. The real power always is. (97)
Our modern day elections in a nutshell:
“Why you fool, it’s the educated reader who can be gulled. All our difficulty comes with the others. When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. (97)
Chapter 6
Jane is reluctantly recruited to the group at St. Anne’s, while Mark eagerly seeks the insider role at NICE, getting pulled into writing cover for a manufactured crisis.
Sometimes you need a crisis to get your policies in place:
“Emergency regulations,” said Feverstone. “You’ll never get the powers we want at Edgestow until the Government declares that a state of emergency exists there.” “Exactly,” said Filostrato. “It is folly to talk of a peaceful revolutions. Not that the canaglia would always resist - often they have to prodded into it - but until there is the disturbance, the firing, the barricades - no one gets powers to act effectively. There is not enough what you call weight on the boat to steer him.” (127)
But the moment of his consent almost escaped his notice; certainly, there was no struggle, no sense of turning a corner. There many have been a time in the world’s history when such moments fully revealed their gravity, with witches prophesying on a blasted heath or visible Rubicons to be crossed. But, for him, it all slipped past in a chatter of laughter, of that intimate laughter between fellow professionals, which of all earthly powers is strongest to make men do very bad things before they are yet, individually, very bad men. (127)
Chapter 7
Jane meets with Ransom and is overwhelmed by his kingliness and desires to stay. She instead learns that her marriage is vital and is sent out. Subsequently she’s arrested by Hardcastle and escapes back to St. Anne’s.
Jane is undone in first meeting Ransom.
For the first time in all those years she tasted the work King itself with all linked associations of battle, marriage, priesthood, mercy, and power. At the moment, as her eyes first rested on her face, Jane forgot who she was, and where, and her faint grudge against Grace Ironwood, and her more obscure grudge against Mark, and her childhood and her father’s house. (140)
I am not allowed to use desperate remedies until desperate diseases are really apparent. Otherwise we become just like our enemies - breaking all the rules whenever we imagine that it might possibly do some vague good to humanity in the remote future. (142)
Chapter 8
While Jane retreats to St. Anne’s and learns more of the director’s mastery over and harmony with nature, Mark is told that Jane needs to join them. He is introduced to the grand vision of an organism-free universe ruled by an immortal mad, a manufactured God.
Mark reflects on the sobering impact Jane would have at Belbury:
Her mere presence would have made all the laughter of the Inner Ring sound metallic, unreal; and what he now regarded as common prudence would seem to her, and through her to himself, mere flattery, back-biting and toad-eating. (168)
Winter’s attempt to get away from organic life:
In us organic life has produced Mind. It has done its work. After that we want no more of it. We do not want the world any longer furred over with organic life, like what you call the blue mould - all sprouting and budding and breeding and decaying. We must get rid of it. By little and little, of course. Slowly we learn how. Learn to make our brains live with less and less body: learn to build our bodies directly with chemicals, no longer have to stuff them full of dead brutes and weeds. Learn how to reproduce ourselves without copulation. (170)
Chapter 9
In this chapter, we get a glimpse beyond the veil and discover that NICE has resurrected the brain of a dead criminal and has grand visions for the future of the race. The demonic powers backing this endeavor become clear, and we learn that the interest in Bragdon Wood is due to the old magician from Arthurian Legend who lies beneath.
It must be remembered that in Mark’s mind hardly one rag of noble thought, either Christian or Pagan, had a secure lodging. His education had been neither scientific nor classical - merely “Modern.” The severities both of abstraction and of high human tradition had passed him by: and he had neither peasant shrewdness nor aristocratic honour to help him. (182)
The Director channels the transhumanists
It is the beginning of what is really a new species - the Chosen Heads who never die. They will call it the next step in evolution. And henceforward, all the creatures that you and I call human are mere candidates for admission to the new species or else its slaves - perhaps its food. (194)
The true unnaturalness of nature:
To those high creatures whose activity builds what we call Nature, nothing is “natural.” From their station the essential arbitrariness (so to call it) of every actual creation is ceaselessly visible; for them there are no basic assumptions: all springs with the willful beauty of a jest or a tune from that miraculous moment of self-limitation wherein the Infinite, rejecting a myriad possibilities, throws out of Himself the positive and elected invention. (199)
Chapter 10
Materialism is in fact no protection. Those who seek it in that hope (they are not negligible class) will be disappointed. The thing you fear is impossible. Well and good. Can you therefore cease to fear it? Not here and now. And what then? If you must see ghosts, it is better not to disbelieve in them (202)
What struck Mark deeply was the almost complete absence of indignation among the speakers, or even of any distinct sympathy with the refugees. Everyone present knew of at least one outrage in Edgestow; but all agreed that these refugees must be greatly exaggerating. “It says in this morning’s paper that things are pretty well settling down,” said the landlord. “That’s right,” agreed the others. “There’ll always been some who get awkward,” said the potato-faced man. “What’s the good of getting awkward?” asked another, “it’s got to go on. You can’t stop it.”… Fragments of articles which Mark himself had written drifted to and fro. Apparently he and his kind had done their work well… (212)
Chapter 11
While Jane and company attempt to discover the risen Merlin, Mark is arrested for murder and brought back to Belbury. Wither and Frost have a conversations that resembles Screwtape and Wormwood. Mark sits and contemplates death in his cell and realizes he’s been living a lie his whole life.
“Oh,” said Wither, “there is nothing I should more deeply deplore. Scientific examination (I cannot allow the word Torture in this context) in cases where a patient doesn’t know the answer is always a fatal mistake. As men of humanity we should neither of us…and then in you go on, the patient naturally does not recover…and if you stop, even an experienced operator is haunted by the fear that perhaps he did know after all. It is is every way unsatisfactory.” (237)
He had a picture of himself, the odious little outsider who wanted to be an insider, the infantile gull, drinking in the husky and unimportant confidences, as if he were being admitted to the government of the planet. Was there no beginning to his folly? Had he been utter fool all through from the very day of his birth? (243)
Chapter 12
Don’t do anything and don’t not do anything…
My dear young friend, the golden rule is very simple. There are only two errors which would be fatal to one placed in the peculiar situation which certain parts of your previous conduct have unfortunately created for you. On the one hand, anything like a lack of initiative or enterprise would be disastrous. On the other, the slightest approach to unauthorised action - anything which suggested that you were assuming a liberty of decision which, in all the circumstances, is not really yours - might have consequences from which even I could not protect you. But as long as you keep quite clear of these two extremes, there is no reason (speaking unofficially) why you should not be perfectly safe.” (250)
Frost’s anti-humanism
Your are to conceive the species as an animal which has discovered how to simplify nutrition and locomotion to such a point that the old complex organs and the large body which contained them are no longer necessary. That large body is therefore to disappear. Only a tenth art of it will now be needed to support the brain. The individual is to become all head. The human race is to become all Technocracy.” (256)
Chapter 13
Good is always getting better and bad is always getting worse: the possibilities of an even apparent neutrality are always diminishing. (281)
The luxury and poverty of modern life.
“Sir,” said Merlin in answer to the question which the director had just asked him. “I give you great thanks. I cannot indeed understand the way you live and your house is strange to me. You give me a bath such as the Emperor himself might envy, but no one attends me to it; a bed softer than sleep itself, but when I rise from it I find I must put on my own clothes with my own hands as if I were a peasant. I lie in a room with windows of pure crystal so that you can see the sky as clearly when they are shut as when they are open, and there is not wind enough within the room to blow out an unguarded tape; but I lie in it alone with no more honour than a prisoner in a dungeon. Your people eat dry and tasteless flesh but it is off plates as smooth as ivory and as round as the sun. In all the house there are warmth and softness and silence that ight put a man in mind of paradise terrestrial; but no hangings, no beautified pavements, no musicians, no perfumes, no high seats, not a gleam of gold, not a hawk, not a hound. You seem to me to live neither like a rich man nor a poor one: neither like a lord or a hermit. Sir, I tell you these things because you have asked me. They are of no importance. Now that none hears us save the last of the seven bears of Logres. it is time that we should open counsels to each other.” (284)
The poison was brewed in these West lands but it has spat itself everywhere by now. However far you went you would find the machines, the crowded cities, the empty thrones, the false writings, the barren beds: men maddened with false promises and soured with true miseries, worshipping the iron works of their own hands, cut off from the Earth there mother and from the Father in heaven. You might go East so far that East became West and you returned to Britain across the great ocean, but even so you would not have come out anywhere into the light. The shadow of one dark wing is over all Tellus.” (290)
Chapter 14
Mark never noticed until years later that here, where there was no room for vanity and no more power or security than that of “children playing in a giant’s kitchen,” he had unawares become a member of a “circle,” as secret and as strongly fenced against outsiders as any that he had dreamed of. (310)
Chapter 15
The celestial eldil descend and grant new powers to Merlin, who then goes undercover to N.I.C.E.. Meanwhile, Studdock has learned to resist the draw of Wither/Frost.
Chapter 16
…only one in the saddle of whose soul rode Mercury himself could thus have unmade language. And this again told him something worse. It meant that his own dark Masters had been completely out in their calculations. They had talked of a barrier which made it impossible that powers from Deep Heaven should reach the surface of the Earth; had assured him that nothing from outside could pass the Moon’s orbit. All their polity was based on the belief that Tellus was blockaded, beyond the reach of assistance and left (as far as that went) to their mercy and his. Therefore he knew the everything was lost. (350)
Chapter 17
“It is not contrary to the laws of Nature,” said a voice from the corner where Grace Ironwood sat, almost invisible in the shadows. “You are quite right. The laws of the universe are never broken. Your mistake is to think that the little regularities we have observed on one planet for a few hundred years are the real unbreakable laws; whereas they are only the remote results which the true laws bring about more often than not; as a kind of accident.” (366)
He doesn’t make two blades of grass the same; how much less two saints, two nations, two angels. The whole work of healing Tellus depends on nursing that little spark, on incarnating that ghost which is still alive in every real people, and different in each. When Logres really dominates Britain, when the goddess Reason, the divine clearness, is really enthroned in France, when the order of Heaven is really followed in China - why, then it will be spring. (369)
All his lectures were devoted to proving the impossibility of ethics, though in private life he’d walked ten miles rather than leave a penny debt unpaid. But all the same… was there a single doctrine practiced at Belbury which hadn’t been preached by some lecturer at Edgestow? Oh, of course, they never though any one would act on their theories! (369)
Perhaps it was all a dream; or perhaps it was the end of the world; or perhaps he was dead. But in spite of all perplexities, he was conscious of extreme well-being. His mind was ill at ease, but as for his body - health and youth and pleasure and longing seemed to be blowing towards him from the cloudy light upon the hill. He never doubted that he must keep on.(378)