{ "export": { "source": "https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4903", "note": "Exported from an unofficial mirror of a public mailing list. Copyright in each message remains with the person who wrote it. Email addresses are obscured as `user at host`, the form the original archive published. This file was rebuilt from parsed fields rather than retained headers, so it is faithful in content but not byte-exact.", "addresses": "obscured as 'user at host'" }, "archive": "urth", "thread": { "id": 4903, "subject": "C.S. Lewis's influence", "messages": 6, "voices": 5, "first": "2007-09-04T21:29:57+00:00", "last": "2007-09-05T18:25:44+00:00" }, "messages": [ { "message_id": "<39ed084f0709041429m210f01e4p234d63f24f2818f@mail.gmail.com>", "from": { "name": "Matthew Groves", "address": "matthewalangroves at gmail.com" }, "date": "2007-09-04T21:29:57+00:00", "subject": "(urth) C.S. Lewis's influence", "in_reply_to": null, "reply_link": null, "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "In the interest of stirring up some discussion on the too-quiet list...\n\nI recently read C.S. Lewis's \"Ransom trilogy\" for the first time\n(comprising Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous\nStrength). I was struck by how much of Lewis's cosmology winds up in\nWolfe's works. It's hard to imagine that Wolfe wasn't thinking of the\neldila and the Oy?resu when he wrote about the Heirodules and the\nHeirogrammates. The comparison isn't perfect, primarily because the\neldila and Oy?resu seem to have been created as angels by God, but\nclearly Tzadkiel is, in some sense, the Oyarsa of Urth.\n\nWolfe's temporal aspect of the three planets Skuld, Urth, and\nVerthandi, may have been influenced by Lewis's conception of a\ntemporal order to the solar system (the outer planets are older and\nthe inner planets are newer). In Lewis you also have the idea of the\nEarth, as a planetary body -- not merely humanity as a fallen creature\n-- as the object of cleansing and renewal.\n\nThere are other similarities to recurring themes in Wolfe's works,\nsuch as the beast-men of Malacandra (compare them to the animal tribes\nof \"Tracking Song\") and the attempts to synthesize Christianity, the\nGreek myths, and Arthurian legends. Perhaps all this is not news to\nany of you, but I just hadn't seen a lot of discussion of Lewis's\ninfluence, and I was shocked by the sense of familiarity, especially\nin reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra.\n\nMatt G." } ] }, { "message_id": "<1f7617370709041445k3d1f8656mce9a9c024891072e@mail.gmail.com>", "from": { "name": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes", "address": "danldo at gmail.com" }, "date": "2007-09-04T21:45:34+00:00", "subject": "(urth) C.S. Lewis's influence", "in_reply_to": "<39ed084f0709041429m210f01e4p234d63f24f2818f@mail.gmail.com>", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I recently read C.S. Lewis's \"Ransom trilogy\" for the first time\n(comprising Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous\nStrength)." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Lucky you! I read them in jr. high school, and missed a lot. While that\ngave me much to catch on rereads, I never had the experience of a\nreasonably-informed first reading." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "I was struck by how much of Lewis's cosmology winds up in\nWolfe's works." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "H'mmm. While I am certainly not prepared to deny any influence of Lewis\nupon Wolfe, I am inclined to think that it's partly a matter of co-influence\n-- i.e., Wolfe's being influenced by Chesterton, whom Lewis also greatly\nadmired -- among other things ... especially ..." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "It's hard to imagine that Wolfe wasn't thinking of the\neldila and the Oy?resu when he wrote about the Heirodules and the\nHeirogrammates. The comparison isn't perfect, primarily because the\neldila and Oy?resu seem to have been created as angels by God, but\nclearly Tzadkiel is, in some sense, the Oyarsa of Urth." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Ummm: I think not-so-much. The Oy?rsu (congrats on getting the Old\nSolar plural right; most people just say \"Oyarsas\") hearken back -- as\nmuch in Lewis's fiction does -- to the medieval. Specifically, to the\nconcept of \"planetary intelligences,\" angels whose \"job\" it was to\nguide the planets through their stately dance to the Music of the Spheres.\nLewis was fascinated by this concept and wrote at least one longish\npoem about the planetary angels.\n\nWolfe's ideas here are (I think) a bit more idiosyncratic. While I imagine\nhe was probably aware of the concept of the planetary intelligences,\nI don't think he had them in mind in creating the Hiero*s. And Tzadkiel\nis certainly *NOT* equivalent to Lewis's Oyarsa of Urth; that is Satan." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "Wolfe's temporal aspect of the three planets Skuld, Urth, and\nVerthandi, may have been influenced by Lewis's conception of a\ntemporal order to the solar system (the outer planets are older and\nthe inner planets are newer). In Lewis you also have the idea of the\nEarth, as a planetary body -- not merely humanity as a fallen creature\n-- as the object of cleansing and renewal." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "These things all hearken back to the medieval, and Wolfe clearly\nconsulted a fair amount of medieval -- specifically, Byzantine --\nhistory in creating the world of the New Sun. Again, not to deny that\nthere is any influence from CSL to GW, but to urge caution where\ncommon sources may be involved." }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "There are other similarities to recurring themes in Wolfe's works,\nsuch as the beast-men of Malacandra (compare them to the animal tribes\nof \"Tracking Song\") and the attempts to synthesize Christianity, the\nGreek myths, and Arthurian legends. Perhaps all this is not news to\nany of you, but I just hadn't seen a lot of discussion of Lewis's\ninfluence, and I was shocked by the sense of familiarity, especially\nin reading Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "This is fascinating to me, for I grew up with Lewis, had read the\ntrilogy several times before tSotT came out, and I quite honestly\nnever felt that sense of familiarity in going the other direction.\n\nAgain, not to deny your perception." }, { "kind": "sig", "depth": 0, "text": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes, writer, trainer, bon vivant\n-----\nhttp://www.livejournal.com/users/sturgeonslawyer\nhttp://www.danehyoakes.com\nI am miserable, he is miserable,\nWe are miserable.\nCan't we have a party? Would he rather have a party?" } ] }, { "message_id": "<39ed084f0709042006y49104d5fif63a70f9f54063bb@mail.gmail.com>", "from": { "name": "Matthew Groves", "address": "matthewalangroves at gmail.com" }, "date": "2007-09-05T03:06:34+00:00", "subject": "(urth) C.S. Lewis's influence", "in_reply_to": "<1f7617370709041445k3d1f8656mce9a9c024891072e@mail.gmail.com>", "reply_link": "subject", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "I seem to have overstated my case, thereby losing my point. I don't\nreally mean to say that Wolfe adopts Lewis's cosmology, but I do want\nto say that there are more resemblances between the Ransom trilogy and\nsome of Wolfe's works than can be accounted for solely by\nco-influence. (I *want* to say that, but I can't quite, not having\nread G.K. Chesterton or a lot of other things both Wolfe and Lewis\nmight have read.) Again, it's probably not too surprising that Wolfe,\nas a Christian sf writer, would be influenced by Lewis (Wolfe even\nnames a character in \"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories\"\nafter Lewis's protagonist, Ransom). But whereas I've seen some\ndiscussion about the influence of H.G. Wells, H.P. Lovecraft, and\nJ.R.R. Tolkien, I haven't seen a lot of discussion of the particular\nmanifestations of C.S. Lewis's influence.\n\nI think the construction of a celestial hierarchy of Heiros for a\nscience-fictional setting is one such manifestation. As to the\nparticulars of Lewis's angelic space beings versus Wolfe's in the New\nSun books, in most ways they are obviously very different.\n\nThe main point: C.S. Lewis refers to classical, medieval and Arthurian\nsources; he embeds these into a new, fictional cosmology that is\ninformed by his contemporaneous scientific understanding and by his\nChristian beliefs; and then he uses it to write sf books. Before I\nread Lewis, I hadn't known anyone but Wolfe to have done this. Wolfe\nis more rigorous and casts his net even wider in terms of his sources,\nbut surely Lewis must have been a model for Wolfe in this regard.\nAlso they both like beast men.\n\nMatt G." } ] }, { "message_id": "<20070905075927.522C51BAD3@che.dreamhost.com>", "from": { "name": "Mo Holkar / UKG", "address": "lists at ukg.co.uk" }, "date": "2007-09-05T07:59:58+00:00", "subject": "(urth) C.S. Lewis's influence", "in_reply_to": "<39ed084f0709042006y49104d5fif63a70f9f54063bb@mail.gmail.com>", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": "At 04:06 05/09/2007, Matt wrote:\nAlso they both like beast men." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Don't we all?\n\nI wonder whether Island of Doctor Death in particular represents a \nplaying-out of tension in Wolfe's influences between Wells and Lewis. \nLewis supposedly admired Wells's imagination but despised his \nmorality, and I think felt his own SF to be in some sense a counter \nto Wells's work. Can we see Wolfe as the synthesis of this dialectic?\n\nMo\n\n\n\n\n# ~ # ~ #\n\nWolfeWiki\nhttp://www.holkar.net/pmwiki/ " } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Andy Robertson", "address": "andywrobertson at clara.co.uk" }, "date": "2007-09-05T10:20:05+00:00", "subject": "(urth) C.S. Lewis's influence", "in_reply_to": "<1f7617370709041445k3d1f8656mce9a9c024891072e@mail.gmail.com>", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Dan'l Danehy-Oakes writes: " }, { "kind": "quote", "depth": 1, "text": " grew up with Lewis, had read the\ntrilogy several times before tSotT came out, and I quite honestly\nnever felt that sense of familiarity in going the other direction." }, { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": " \n\nDitto, and ditto \n\nI'm sure Wolfe has read Lewis, but I don't see any sort of direct influence. \n\nWhat I do see is that Wolfe in the New/Long/Short sun books is writing in \nthe same genre as Lewis in his SF trilogy - religious science fiction that \npresupposes the objective reality of angelic beings and of god - and that \nthis is a genre so sparsely exploited today that one may see linkages of a \ntype that are not there. \n\nhartshorn \n\n\nhttp://www.thenightland.co.uk \n\n01273-488272 / 0777-214-9545 " } ] }, { "message_id": "", "from": { "name": "Michael Straight", "address": "mfstraight at gmail.com" }, "date": "2007-09-05T18:25:44+00:00", "subject": "(urth) C.S. Lewis's influence", "in_reply_to": "<39ed084f0709041429m210f01e4p234d63f24f2818f@mail.gmail.com>", "reply_link": "header", "blocks": [ { "kind": "text", "depth": 0, "text": "Matt,\n\nYou're not the only one who has seen connections between Wolfe and\nLewis. One particular standout to me that I wrote about on the list a\nwhile back is this scene from Perelandra:\n\nRansom, the protagonist, is in a situation where it seems the Devil\nhimself (or his representative) is trying to do a Very Bad Thing and\nRansom wonders why God seems to be allowing it...\n\n \"Had Hell a prerogative to work wonders? Why did Heaven work none?\n ...he was forced to perceive that his own coming to Perelandra was\n at least as much of a marvel as the Enemy's. That miracle on the\n right side, which he had demanded, had in fact occured. He himself\n was the miracle...If the issue lay in [God's] hands, Ransom and the\n Lady *were* those hands. The fate of a world really depended on how\n they behaved in the next few hours\" (Perelandra, p. 140-142).\n\nThis seems so close to Silk's formulation of the Outsider's\nrevelation, \"I am to receive no help, because I am help\" that I'm\ninclined to believe it must have been an influence on Wolfe.\n\nAnd note that this theme keeps popping up in Wolfe. There's the bit\nin Soldier of Arete where Latro receives a similar response when he\nremarks on the possible danger of the task given him by one of the\ngodesses: \"If a child could have done it, I would not\nhave chosen you.\"\n\nThe other, minor connection I saw was that (especially in Nightside\nwhen I thought he\nwas a villain), Remora's speech patterns reminded me a whole lot of\nWithers from _That Hideous Strength_.\n\nRostrum" } ] } ] }